


Abide With Me

by commoncomitatus



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 7 [1]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 09:52:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7431125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-"Friend In Need". Eve tries to help Gabrielle mourn, but finds that understanding doesn't come as easily as empathy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Hurt/Comfort Bingo](http://hc-bingo.livejournal.com) Round 7.  
> Prompt: Forced Body Modification

*

They say she’s travelling alone.

That’s how Eve knows it’s not true. She hears them talking about it, murmuring among themselves when they think she can’t hear, but she knows it’s a lie because she knows _her_ , and she knows that she would never, ever leave Mother behind. Not while there was breath in her body.

They say she’s been picking fights, bleeding dry anyone who dares to disagree with her. Eve doesn’t need to list all the reasons why that’s not true either, why it can’t possibly be true. They say she’s carrying the chakram now, that she uses it to punctuate her points and puncture body parts. A sharp edge, they say, to sharpen her words. They say she’s angry, they say she’s violent, they say she’s doing things Eve knows she never would. Not her. Mother, perhaps, if the moment was right, but not _her_.

They say she’s wearing a dragon on her back now. They say it’s huge; they say it’s beautiful. They say she got it in Jappa, and that it has magical properties. They say it protects her, and brings pain to anyone who tries to touch it, or her. They say it looks like a living thing; they say it looks dangerous. They say it must have hurt very much.

They say she talks to the empty air. They say she argues with the wall. They say she spends her time mumbling like a madman, chatting away when there’s no-one there. They say she’s losing her mind, or else that it’s already lost. They say things that make Eve wish she was still Livia, if only for a moment, so that she could cut out their tongues for spreading lies.

She’s not still Livia, though, and so she doesn’t do anything about it. She just listens, pretending that she doesn’t hear, and swallows down the old familiar feelings when they rise up again. She won’t allow herself to get angry, and she will not be goaded into violence again. She has fought too hard, come so far beyond it, to be drawn back into that life now. She won’t be led astray, no matter what slanderous nonsense she hears, no matter what terrible, truthless things they say.

Instead, she does what she does best, what she’s learned to do best. She smiles, soft and serene, as peaceful as she can, and tells them not to believe every silly little thing they hear.

They don’t know what they’re talking about. Eve does. She knows them, and she knows _her_. She knows how slander works, and she knows why people lie, and she knows that, whatever the reason, this is one of those lies. She knows it’s not true. As surely as she knows her own name, she knows that this can’t be true. She _knows_ …

…until, at last, she sees it for herself.

*

Rome is always reaching beyond its grasp.

Eve knows that better than most. As Livia, she conquered more nations than most of her followers today will ever see in their lifetimes. She has killed thousands of men in the name of Rome, and if not for Eli’s intervention she might have killed thousands more, all the while striving for millions. She knows how ruthless the Empire is and she knows that it will never be satisfied until it rules the known world. Once upon a time, it would have excited her to be a part of that; now, it sickens her just to see it.

For a time, she truly believed that peace was a possibility. She thought she was making progress, thought that the new emperor was more receptive than the old to Eli’s ideals and her own suggestions. For a time, the world held its breath, the future tilted on a knife-edge. Eve felt more powerful as a peacemaker than she ever did as a soldier, and she truly thought that she could change the course of the world. She truly believed that she could turn the great conquerers into emissaries for peace. For a time, anyway.

Rome doesn’t change so easily, though, and neither does history. She should have known that; she’s been a part of both for so long that even now there are times when she thinks of the Empire as more her mother than Xena ever was. She should have realised that Rome was not ready for peace, that the tide would turn back on itself with the uncovering of new nations, new people, new corners of the world to conquer and claim and paint red. Perhaps a part of her knew it already, the part that chose to journey East instead of continuing to serve under an emperor who was still so much a victim of his time. Either way, the tide turned back, as waters so often do. Once again, Rome conquers, but this time it does so with a new champion.

Eve doesn’t fight. Perhaps she should, for the conquered instead of the conquerors, but the temptation is always too keen, a blade at her neck just waiting to cut her open and remind her that she bleeds too. If she picks up a weapon now, even for the noblest cause, she knows that it will be no time at all before she’s baying for blood again with her eye on the throne, the hunger for power and glory reignited within her. It took divine intervention to silence it the first time; she shudders to think what it would take to draw her out of there again.

So, instead, she tends the wounded, the struggling, the displaced and the broken. She deals, as Eli did, in faith and love and hope, and teaches the survivors how to go on without their lost loved ones and their broken homes. She does what little she can, burdened by the knowledge that it will never be enough. She’ll never atone completely for the things she did under Rome’s care and in her name, and all the preaching in the world can’t make up for the lives she might save today if she would only take up arms to defend them. It’s not enough, spreading peace and hope to those who have none, but still she tries. It’s all she can do.

She heard that they were pushing again, spreading their roots further and further out into the world. After the East, she journeyed south, and even here among the sands and the heat and the winds she finds the fingerprints of her erstwhile mother country. Even here she sees Rome’s fingerprints; everywhere she looks, she finds people in need.

The ones who fight back get the worst of it, as they always have. Livia knew that well; a village might fend off one assault well enough, but the second would raze it to the ground and its people along with it. The mother country always had a vindictive streak. Now, years later, Eve finds herself shaking at the sight of eager, bright-eyed young people who imagine they’ve won, shouting in victory and waving their banners as the first attack is driven back. They think ‘retreat’ means ‘defeat’, but they are wrong. Livia would have returned in three days; Eve expects their latest champion will return in two.

She stays nearby, out of sight, and waits. When it’s over, she knows, there will be wounded. There will be broken souls and broken spirits, broken hearts and broken bones, and she will be needed to mend them all. She can’t protect or defend them, can’t trust herself with a weapon in her hand, but she can help them to pick up the pieces after it’s done. She can offer healing balms and healing words, peace and a place to recover. She can help them to reclaim some part of what she knows they will lose.

It never occurs to her that they might not lose at all. In all her life, she has never seen Rome driven back twice from the same place.

She watches in disbelief as the last of them is cut down, a scream gurgling in his throat as he dies. Blood soaks through his tunic, staining his armour deep red, and the sunlight catches the curve of the blade in his back. It bends in a near-perfect circle, deadly and buried impossibly deep; Eve thinks for a moment that she recognises it, but she shakes off the thought before it takes root. That can’t be right, of course. It’s a trick of the light, or else the way the sand cuts through the blood. It’s the excitement, the triumph bleeding out from the cheering villagers. It’s—

It’s a flash of short blonde hair, tight shoulders, and a dragon.

It’s _her_ , and Eve’s breath stops in her chest.

She’s gaunt and very thin. Even from a distance, that much is obvious, and it strikes her like a hammer on hot steel; she was always so sturdy, so steady and so strong, but now she looks like a breath might break her, like a starved little bird with a monster on its back. It’s only been a handful of months since they last saw each other, but she is so transformed now that it might as well have been a decade. She looks old and young at the same time, and Eve can’t decide whether she wants to run to her or run from her.

She runs to her. If she’s learned anything from spreading Eli’s word, it’s to never turn away from a soul in need.

She calls her name, parched and choked by sand. It must not carry very well because she doesn’t turn around.

She tries again as she reaches her side. With barely a body’s space between them, she drops a hand down onto her shoulder, and almost chokes on her own breath. The muscles are so tight, locked and fragile at the same time; it’s as though they’re held together by will alone. When she tries her name a second time, testing it on her tongue, it’s barely a whisper.

“Gabri—”

She doesn’t get to the third syllable. The chakram, still wet with blood, is at her throat.

The danger is clear, and Eve has to swallow hard to keep her emotions in check. She doesn’t move, stopping her breath in her chest and fighting down the rising horror. _She doesn’t recognise you,_ she tells herself _This place is ravaged by war and barbarism. It’s only sensible to assume the worst when someone touches without invitation_.

That may be true, but it it doesn’t make it any less harrowing to see such a reaction in the one person who would never, ever think that way.

Eve doesn’t say her name again. She just wets her lips and waits.

It takes a moment. A long, long moment, and that is a worry in itself. Gabrielle’s reflexes have always been sharp, more so than any other part of her, honed like the edge of a blade, like the curve of her sai. Eve has seen them twist and turn her body in a fraction of a second, has seen her turn the tide of a fight or negotiation in less than the time it takes her opponents to draw breath. She reacts lightning-fast, trained from years of travelling with Mother, years of tamping down earth churned up by warlords and warriors. Eve might not know her as well as Mother does, but she has never seen her react like this, slow and sluggish and barely aware.

“Eve?” she whispers, at long last, and slowly pulls the chakram back.

Her face transforms when Eve smiles. It’s as though she’s seeing her for the first time, not as she did when they parted ways a few months ago, but as she must have seen her after those long twenty-five years, when Eve grew and became Livia and Gabrielle slept in an ice cave, unchanged. She’s blinking like the world has transformed in front of her, like she doesn’t recognise anything any more. Eve can’t count the emotions she sees, each one more potent than the last, cascading across the face she thought she knew.

Joy. That’s the first one, and the briefest. Overwhelming and beautiful, albeit fleeting, it makes her seem almost like herself again, light sparking behind her eyes and colour rushing to her face.

Anger. It washes away the joy in a flood of red, the light extinguished as though swallowed by a scream. It only lasts a moment longer, but a moment that feels so long.

She turns her head to the side. “Your daughter,” she hisses, waving the blood-soaked chakram at the air, and she sounds like she wants to cry. Her voice is raw, as though she’s spent a long time swallowing “ _Your daughter_.”

Eve frowns, looking around. She doesn’t see Mother anywhere.

“Gabrielle…” she starts, but her face is already changing again.

Grief. That’s the one that sticks. Long after the others are gone, the joy and the anger and the flickering, fluttering little moments between, what remains is depthless and utterly devastated.

And now, for the first time since she heard the murmurs, Eve understands.

Spreading Eli’s teachings has exposed her to a dozen different kinds of suffering, a dozen breeds of sorrow and pain. She has brought faith to families torn asunder, offered comfort to people with broken bodies or broken hearts, given hope to those who have watched their world burn to ashes all around them. She has helped people who have nothing, and she has helped people who _want_ nothing, the lost and the lonely and the ones who wish only for death. She has seen every kind of pain imaginable, and she recognises this one all too well.

“When?” she asks.

She tries to keep her voice steady. It’s just one word, a small, simple syllable, but still the ghost of a tremor shows through. Eve has become an expert in keeping her own feelings hidden inside — it’s a challenge, she’s learned, to offer comfort when she’s crying too — but this strikes hard. She schools herself as best she can, but her knees feel like someone has kicked them out from under her, and it takes all her strength just to stay standing.

She’ll have time to bathe in her own grief later, she reminds herself. Now she has more important things to do.

Gabrielle doesn’t say anything. She’s staring, mouth half-open like she wants to speak, maybe even like she’s trying to, but no sound comes out at all. She’s blinking rapidly, her eyes bloodshot but dry.

Eve thinks about reaching for her again, offering what comfort she can in contact, but she can still feel the blood sticking to her neck where the chakram touched, and she doesn’t want to startle her. She’s seen people like this before; it hurts a little more, seeing it in someone she cares about — and all the more so knowing as she does the reason why — but she is Eli’s messenger before she is anything else, and her experience speaks louder than her personal feelings. The woman before her is a shell, a shadow of someone Eve once knew, but she is not herself. Eve has to be for her.

“Gabrielle,” she says again. Names help sometimes. They’re a tether, a reminder. She prays that Gabrielle can remember. “Gabrielle. Do you hear me?”

“Eve,” she says again. A tether, a reminder.

 _Good,_ Eve thinks. “That’s right,” she says.

Gabrielle looks away again, jaw paling, eyes turning to steel as they lock on nothing. “How am I supposed to tell her, Xena? She’s _your_ daughter. You’re supposed to do that, not me. You’re supposed to make her understand.”

Eve does understand. She’s seen this before too. “Mother,” she says, but she’s not talking to whatever spectre Gabrielle imagines she sees. She’s just trying to make this easier. “She’s dead.”

Gabrielle chokes, but she doesn’t shed even a single tear. “I’m sorry…” she whispers.

Eve shakes her head. The part of her that was Livia, that knows the dangers of a life like theirs, knew that this day would come sooner rather than later. Champions, warriors, heroes, even villains… people like her and Mother know that their lives are short. Gabrielle was the idealist among them, the one who believed they would all live forever, that love alone would be enough to keep them alive and safe. Even after her rebirth, Eve was never so naïve, but she would sooner die herself than take away Gabrielle’s. The Fates, it seem, are not so compassionate.

“ _I’m_ sorry,” she says.

Oh, how sorry she is.

*

Gabrielle doesn’t clean the chakram.

Eve takes it from her. She’s nauseated by the sight of blood, but not nearly so much as she is by the cold way Gabrielle looks at it, the way she looks around herself, distant and dissociated, like this is all just one of her stories. There’s a line of Roman bodies leading away from the village, a stark warning against a third attack, but Gabrielle doesn’t seem to see them at all. She doesn’t seem to realise that she’s the one who killed them, that she’s the reason the bad people are dead and the good ones are safe.

She stands there, silent and shell-shocked, as Eve wipes down the chakram. She’s staring at a spot just past her shoulder, eyes cloudy and unfocused, and though she doesn’t speak to it this time Eve knows what she’s seeing.

“There’s nothing there,” she murmurs.

She tries to say it gently, but there’s very little of that in her voice when the words come out. It frustrates her, the cracks she feels deep inside herself when she speaks now. She is so good at this when she’s dealing with new people, with strangers whose names she’ll soon forget, but this is very different. This isn’t a suffering stranger grieving for some faceless, nameless soul; it’s _Gabrielle_ , and she’s grieving for _Mother_.

Gabrielle swallows. “I know.” she says, but keeps staring just the same.

Eve sighs, and hands back the chakram. “There was a lot of blood on that,” she points out, without judgement.

Gabrielle hangs it on her belt without looking. “There were a lot of people who needed to bleed.”

That’s definitely true. Eve doesn’t want to think about what would have happened to this village and its people if not for the blood-soaked chakram. She doesn’t want to think about what might have happened if Gabrielle had stood by and done nothing like she herself did. Still, hearing it pitched like that strikes a strange, discordant note in her head. Eve doesn’t need to wonder what Mother would think about all this; it’s written all over Gabrielle’s face.

“You’ve never been the one to do that,” she says, very carefully.

“No,” Gabrielle says, blinking very hard. “But someone had to.”

“Gabrielle…”

“ _Someone_ had to do it.” She’s not talking to Eve, and her shoulders are shaking as she glares at that spot behind her. “You didn’t think about that, did you? Someone has to take care of the world now you’re gone. Someone has to protect it. Someone has to…”

Eve knows better than to try to interrupt. She squints through the shimmering heat-haze, tries to find some shadow of what she knows Gabrielle is seeing so clearly. A flicker, a phantom, anything to say that her mother is still here somewhere, that she really is looking after the people she loved. She wants to believe it, wants to see it for herself, but she knows that she won’t. If Mother was here in the way Gabrielle believes she is, she would never allow her to tread this path.

“It was supposed to be you,” Gabrielle is saying. “You were the world’s protector, Xena. You were _my_ protector. Now you’re gone and the world’s broken, and I…” She reaches down without thinking to grip the chakram; unfamiliar as she is with having it, her palm finds the blade instead of the handle. “I’m just a _girl_ with a _chakram_.”

Eve takes her by the wrist. “Be careful,” she warns, but of course the damage is already done. The chakram is slick once again with blood, and so too is Gabrielle’s hand.

Gabrielle looks up, catches her eye, recognition flaring for a beat or two. “She’s gone,” she whispers, like a secret. “She’s gone, and I don’t know how to do the things she did without becoming the thing she was.”

Eve doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what to do.

Things were so much simpler the last time their paths crossed. Gabrielle had taken a beating in her name, fought in vain against an angry god-trained Amazon to save her life. Eve remembers how fragile she felt when they hugged their last goodbye; she imagined she could feel her ribs fracturing beneath her fingertips. She never stood a chance, she remembers thinking, but that didn’t stop her even for a second.

Gabrielle fought Varia in her name, not because she expected to win but because she had to. Because _someone_ had to. It’s the one thing that has always made her fight. No matter the situation, no matter the circumstance, no matter the personal cost. She will always do what she feels is right.

She bled back then, and she’s bleeding again now, a long line slashed across the palm where it found the chakram’s sharp edge. The sight makes Eve wince, more than a dozen mortal wounds from a dozen Roman soldiers.

“Come on,” she says, steeling her voice. “We need to stop the bleeding.”

Gabrielle looks down at her hand, frowning like she’s never seen it before. Eve wonders if the gash is painful; it’s bleeding quite heavily, but it doesn’t look too deep. “No,” she murmurs, furrowing her brow. “I don’t want that.”

Eve knew that was coming. Not for the first time, the masochism is written all over her face.

“I know,” she says, as gently as she can. “But _she_ would.”

*

The cut is deeper than it looks.

Eve borrows clean water and clean linen from one of the villagers. They’re more than eager to offer anything they can, all too aware of the fact that they owe Gabrielle their lives. Gabrielle doesn’t seem to realise it herself, but they certainly do. They call her a hero, not just a ‘girl with a chakram’ but a woman with a dragon, and they don’t seem to notice as Eve does the way her face turns pale when they look at her.

It’s a strange thing, protecting someone who has always been so strong. Gabrielle didn’t even break a sweat when she was slaughtering the would-be conquerors, but faced now with thankful civilians she’s trembling all over. Eve doesn’t know what to think about that, or how to react. It was always Mother who was uncomfortable in moments like this, who thrilled at battle and hated the praise; Gabrielle’s the one who always relished it.

She doesn’t relish it now. She doesn’t say anything about it, but Eve is too close to miss the way she sighs and shudders. It crashes over her, grief like a great wave, and she has to bite down on her lip to hold the sob inside.

“This might sting a little,” she warns, wetting a piece of cloth.

Gabrielle laughs, a wild, struggling sound. “I don’t think so.”

She may well be right about that. If it does sting, she shows no sign of it. She sits in silence, limbs loose and expression unreadable, and doesn’t react at all to the contact. It’s as though she doesn’t feel it, as though she doesn’t feel anything.

Eve cleans the wound, casting occasional less-than-subtle glances at the dragon on Gabrielle’s back. It’s a vast, shimmering thing, beautiful and frightening in equal measure. Eve has travelled a lot over the last few months, but she hasn’t seen anything like that. She wants to ask if it hurt as much as the people say it must, if that’s why she seems so numb now to a little blood and a little pressure. She wants to ask why she has it, what she did to deserve such a thing. She wants to ask so many questions, but she doesn’t know if she wants the answers.

“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs, more to make conversation than anything else.

“It’s horrible.” Gabrielle closes her eyes, hisses in her breath through her teeth as though in pain. “I want it gone.”

Eve grimaces. “I don’t know if that’s possible…”

“None of what happened there was possible,” Gabrielle snaps. After so much silence, it’s almost a relief to hear her voice rising in anger. “That didn’t stop it from happening.”

“I’m sorry,” Eve says. She doesn’t know what else to say.

Gabrielle shakes her head. She tries to pull her hand away, but Eve holds on tight. She studies the gash as she cleans it, watching the cloth soak up the blood. She’s never really let herself look too closely at the chakram, too familiar with the violence it represents, and with what it always meant to Mother. It was a spiritual thing, or so it seemed sometimes, and Eve didn’t like the feeling that stirred in her chest when she saw Mother’s face light up to hold it. It made her remember her other mother, the Empire, and the heady thrill she felt when she conquered or killed in its name.

She knows that the chakram is sharp. She’s seen the damage it can do to people, and she remembers now in a flash of unwanted memory the sound it made so long ago when it connected with Gabrielle’s skull. There was so much blood back then, from both of them. Gabrielle struck first, tormented by the Furies into making a try on Eve’s life, and Mother struck a heartbeat later, the chakram stopping her in her tracks. Eve remembers thinking that if this truly was the end for her, at least she would die knowing a mother’s love; at least she would die knowing what love truly felt like. She wondered then, and wonders again now, if Gabrielle thought the same thing.

Neither of them are dying this time. The gash is deep but not dangerous, a razor-thin line across the palm, and as Eve leans in to study it she realises that it’s not the only one there.

There’s another, older and thicker, like something was carved out of her. It’s long since faded now, a curved white scar that crosses the length of her palm from the top of her wrist to her index finger. The line is very strong, much more than the careless slash she caught from the chakram. Livia inflicted countless wounds like this, though rarely across the palm, and she can tell that was done on purpose. She frowns, letting her fingers trace the curve, and looks up at Gabrielle with a question on her tongue.

Gabrielle smiles. It’s only for a second, but it melts Eve’s heart.

 _There she is,_ she thinks, awed. _There’s the woman my mother loved._

“I was protecting you.” Eve never asked the question out loud, but apparently Gabrielle heard it just the same. “You weren’t even born yet, but I had to protect you. I…” The smile fades. “I loved you so much already.”

She sounds so much like Mother. Eve knows that she always spoke about her as _theirs_ , but this is the first time she’s truly understood _why_ , the first time she’s truly seen a mother’s love in Gabrielle as well. She recognises the ghost of Mother in her, the passion and the warmth and the beauty, the delicate family moments that time and the old gods ripped away from them all. She wants to go back, if only for a moment, wants to look down on herself as a baby. She wants to see from a distance a time when she was pure.

“What happened?” she asks, brushing the scar with her thumb.

She binds the new wound while Gabrielle talks about the old one, a white linen bandage that stands out starkly against the skin. It’s a strange, surreal story, a dead shamaness and a spiritual realm and a moment when Gabrielle was the one who died. Eve watches her very carefully as she speaks, watches the memories rippling through her, fearful in one moment and fond in the next, kind to herself in a way that comes easier now with the benefit and the blessing of hindsight. Eve doesn’t need to ask whether she felt that way at the time.

“She wanted your soul,” Gabrielle explains softly. “Alti. She wanted to take your place and be born again. Xena was too weak to face her, so I…” She trails off for a second or two, and Eve watches the story play out across the lines on her face as she touches her freshly-bound palm. “There’s an Amazon ritual for crossing over. This was a part of it.”

Eve raises a brow, curious and a little confused. By her own admission, she doesn’t know much about the Amazons and their ways. What little time she has spent among them wasn’t exactly the kind that bred discussion and the sharing of culture; as Livia, she needed slaves and conquests, and Ares made sure she thought of the Amazons as good sport. Beyond that she never gave them much thought at all until much later, after she reawoke as Eve and found herself among them again. Varia saw through her new face in a heartbeat, recognised the conqueror beneath, and Eve is ashamed to admit that she didn’t recognise Varia at all.

Eve regrets a great deal about her past, but none more than what she did to the Amazons. The ones Gabrielle talks about, so full of love and respect, are decades dead now; the ones that Eve knows are a scattered gathering cobbled together from dozens of long-buried tribes, women too stubborn or too stupid to give up and let their old ways die with their elders. There are too few left to hold on to their traditions, and too many clashing cultures to ever agree on which ones are important. The Amazons that Gabrielle speaks about are long gone now, and their rituals with them.

“It didn’t work,” Gabrielle is saying, weighted with regret. “I wasn’t strong enough either. But I tried. I did what I could. I would have done anything in the world to keep you safe…” She turns away again, and Eve feels a pang in her chest when she speaks once more to the air. “She’s my daughter too.”

Eve has never really thought of herself like that. When they first clashed, when she was Livia and had just learned who Xena was, she called her ‘Auntie Gabrielle’ out of spite. She used the name as a mockery, a cruel, cutting jibe intended to wound, but it’s only now that she realises how deep that wound must truly have run. Back then, angry and vengeful and full of malice, the thought never occurred to her that a woman who was not her mother might look at her and feel as much love as if she was.

She sees it now. Gabrielle looks at her, when she can bear to look away from her phantoms, like Eve is the last little piece of Mother left in the world, the only thing she has to cling to, for good or for ill, like she’s her only hope and her greatest fear, and both at the same time. She looks at Eve through the eyes of one who lost everyone and everything she ever cared about, who is so afraid of losing the only love she has left.

Eve doesn’t deserve to be that person, the one that someone like Gabrielle would pin their fading hopes on. She has as much blood under her hands as Mother did at her age; it is her duty now to spread the word of love, but she has long since given up on deserving that blessing for herself. There are reasons, after all, why she wouldn’t let Mother or Gabrielle accompany her on her journey to the East.

Still, she can’t turn away from this. Just one glance at Gabrielle’s lined, weary face tells her that she’s been alone for too long already. Eve might have her own path to travel, but she can’t leave Gabrielle to drown here on her own. She spent her whole life by Mother’s side, lived with her and loved her and never spent more than a day or two days away from her. She can’t survive alone like this.

“How long has she been dead?” Eve asks.

Gabrielle makes a strangled sound, then shakes her head. “Too long,” she says, but Eve can’t help thinking she really means _‘not long enough’_. If it were, maybe the grief would have faded into something she could breathe through. “I don’t know. How long have I been here? A couple of weeks?”

Eve swallows her own grief. “You don’t know?”

“Why does it matter?” She sounds so vacant, so hollow. “It’s all the same, isn’t it? A day, a week, a lifetime…”

 _No,_ Eve thinks fiercely. _No, it’s not ‘all the same’. I want to know when my mother died. I want to know when you started mourning. I want to know. In Eli’s name, I deserve to know._

“Gabrielle,” she says. It takes more effort than she’d care to admit, forcing down her own turmoil to focus instead on what she knows is right. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

Gabrielle shakes her head. “I don’t…” she starts, but can’t seem to finish.

Eve touches the chakram, still hanging loosely on her belt. “How many times have you cut yourself on that thing?”

“I’m still learning,” Gabrielle says, then turns to glare at the air. “I’ve not had as much practice as _you_.”

Eve follows her gaze. There’s still nothing there. She stifles her sigh, because she doesn’t want Gabrielle to see how upsetting this is, and tries a different tack.

“I don’t think you should be doing this,” she says. “Surrounding yourself with so much violence when you’re alone and grieving. Don’t you think you should take some time away from all this? Don’t you think you should mourn?”

It’s a very serious question, and it weighs heavier on her than she wants Gabrielle to see. There’s something tragic in the way she talks to the air, the way she says _‘you’_ to her phantasms like it’s a crude insult, the way she doesn’t really look at Eve even when she’s talking to her. Eve has seen this all before, and she knows where Gabrielle will end up if she continues down the path she’s on.

“I can mourn later,” Gabrielle says. It’s a good sign, Eve thinks, that she’s not pretending she already has. “I can mourn when this is over. When there aren’t people in need.”

“Then you never will,” Eve tells her. “There will always be people in need.”

She’s learned that the hard way. It’s been a difficult path, looking around herself and seeing so much suffering she can’t heal, knowing that she has inflicted far worse herself, that there are people out there who will never recover from the terrible things she did to them. She thinks again of the Amazons, of Varia and her slaughtered sister, of the countless others she sold into slavery or worse. There is always good to be done, she’s learned, but there is not enough in the world to atone for the pain she’s inflicted. She could work tirelessly, spreading Eli’s word every day of life, never stopping to eat or sleep or breathe, and it wouldn’t make any difference in the end. What’s done is done, and no amount of kindness or compassion will ever undo it.

Gabrielle doesn’t have any dark deeds to atone for. She does good because she _is_ good, because goodness lives and thrives inside of her. Eve doesn’t need to look too hard to see the things Mother always saw in her, but she’s learned in a way that Gabrielle probably never will that she can’t save everyone. Sometimes there’s just too much hurt to heal. Sometimes _she_ is the one in need.

Of course, Eve doesn’t expect Gabrielle to care about any of that. She’s too focused, too angry and upset. Eve remembers the way she darkened all over when they visited Poteidaia, when she learned what had happened to her family, her parents and her niece. She shudders, remembering the way she transformed when she heard the name _Gurkhan_. She remembers the voyage to Mogador, how easily she was overcome with grief and hate, the thirst for vengeance that was so unnatural for her. Gabrielle is not the kind of person who can work through her feelings quietly or healthily; she pours them over everything, and drowns herself in them.

She’s drowning in them now. Eve knows it, and perhaps there is a part of Gabrielle that knows it too, because when she turns to face her there is a desperate kind of loneliness etched in the lines of her face, a plea that she won’t ever allow herself to voice. She is so afraid to let go of those feelings, so afraid to let the anger and the violence burn through her. Eve can understand that; she feels things very strongly too, and she knows much better than Mother ever did just how frightening that can be.

“Gabrielle,” she presses, and sighs at the way she hunches her shoulders. “Take some time to work through this. Learn how to use the chakram without hurting yourself, learn how to use it without burying it in someone’s back.”

“Really?” Gabrielle counters, angry but so tired. “You don’t think they deserved it?”

“I know they did,” Eve says, very softly. “But not from _you_. Gabrielle, do you really think Mother would want you to do this? Losing yourself piece by piece with every life you take, hurting yourself by holding on too tightly to her memory. Do you really think that’s what she’d want for you?”

Gabrielle stares into the air.

“I don’t hear her complaining,” she says.

*


	2. Chapter 2

*

They spend the night under the same roof.

That hasn’t happened in well over a year. After Gurkhan, before Mother and Gabrielle lost themselves in the Norse lands, before Eve understood how best to walk the road she’s chosen. They travelled together briefly, then separated, and the next thing they knew it was over a year later. A lot can happen in a year, and by the time they were reunited Ares and Aphrodite were back on Mount Olympus, Eve was a prisoner of the Amazons, and Gabrielle was being beaten into submission by one of their queens.

They didn’t spend much time together then. Eve was kept in chains, and she didn’t really have a chance to see or speak to anyone else until it was all over, until reflection and understanding had shown her the path she had to take. They parted quickly, with a touching farewell, and Eve thought it would be at least another year’s turn before she saw her mother or Gabrielle again.

She wishes that had proven true.

They borrow a room at the local inn. The innkeeper declines their coin, citing Gabrielle’s heroic deeds as payment enough. Eve accepts the kindness graciously, with a smile and a toss of her head, but Gabrielle does not. She keeps her eyes locked on the wall and the air, and doesn’t say anything. Eve thinks it’s a little impolite but of course she understands, and she guides Gabrielle up the stairs like she would a lost child.

Eve has hope. She’s counselled grieving souls before, and it’s a good sign that Gabrielle gave in to this willingly, that she chose company over the familiar solitude. It shouldn’t really surprise her; Gabrielle has always been the social one, the one who smiles and shares and opens herself up to people. It comes naturally to her, spending time with others, even in a moment like this. It’s almost by muscle memory that she does whatever Eve tells her to, as though Xena’s daughter can somehow replace her at her side.

Eve has no intention of doing that, of course, but she’s seen enough to know that Gabrielle shouldn’t be alone.

Gabrielle sits down on the bed, unprompted. She stares at the pillows for a long time. “It’s strange,” she says.

“Sleeping alone?” Eve asks.

“Sleeping without _her_ ,” Gabrielle says, shaking her head as though there’s a difference. If there is, Eve doesn’t see it. “Sleeping at all, I guess. It’s hard. It’s… it never used to be hard. She used to…” Her voice cracks. She turns to stare at the air again; she’s blinking very hard, but her eyes are still so dry. “Do you remember? You used to say that I could sleep through the end of the world.”

Eve feels a lump rising up into her throat. Her heart breaks a little more every time she does that. “Gabrielle…”

“I know.” She doesn’t look away. “I know she’s not there. I know that.”

Her breathing is laboured now, rasping and ragged. Eve can see the pain in her eyes, can see her knuckles turning white where her fists find the sheets. She’s fighting down so much emotion, all the time. Eve wants to take her into her arms and beg her to cry herself empty, to offer her a safe harbour to ride out all her storms, but she doesn’t. Gabrielle is too afraid of her feelings to let them out in front of her, and no amount of coaxing will bring those storms to the surface.

“I think we should go somewhere else,” Eve tells her, letting the emphasis settle quietly on _‘we’_. “Back to Greece.”

Gabrielle shakes her head. “I’m still needed here,” she says, not really speaking to Eve. “I have too much to do.”

“You’ve done a lot of good here already,” Eve points out. “You’ve helped a lot of people, and saved a lot of lives. But you need to save yourself as well.”

“I can’t afford to do that.”

She doesn’t really mean that, though. Eve can read the notes between the words, the moments when her breath catches for just a beat too long, the moments when she can’t seem to breathe at all. She doesn’t mean _‘I can’t afford to do that’_ , she means _‘I’m afraid to’_. Eve understands that feeling all too well. If she stops even for a second, it will all crash down on her. If she lets herself mourn, she’ll have to open her eyes and accept that the loss is forever.

Eve doesn’t mention any of that. She’s learned in her travels when to push and when to pull back, and she’s learned too when to sweeten the truth into something a little easier to swallow.

“Well, then,” she says. “Maybe you’re needed elsewhere too.”

“Back in Greece?” Gabrielle tries to shrug it off, but her shoulders seem to seize, as though weighted down by something terribly heavy. She looks so weary; Eve wants to rock her until she falls asleep. “Do you think so?”

She looks dubious, but there’s a tiny flicker of hope hiding behind the cynicism. Eve wonders what these last few weeks must have been like for her, out here in this strange land completely alone, guided only by her conscience and the vague idea of what Mother would have wanted her to do. It must be a huge relief, if a toxic one, to finally be in the company of someone willing to choose for her, someone who can lay her down and say _‘let me decide’_.

She doesn’t have to agree. It’s enough, Eve knows, that for a few blessed moments she doesn’t need to think.

“I do,” Eve says. “It doesn’t matter where you go, there are always wrongs to make right. You’ll always find a way to make a difference. There or here, there will be people who need you. But _here_ is nowhere important, and _there_ is your home.” She closes her eyes. The sight of her like this is draining. “Gabrielle, don’t you want to go home?”

The answer is written all over her face but she says it out loud anyway. “I don’t know what that means any more.”

Eve sighs. “I can’t tell you that,” she says. “But I can go back there with you. We can figure it out together.”

“Don’t you have work to do here too?” It’s a selfless question, asked without emotion. “I thought you wanted to spread Eli’s message.”

“I do. And I am. But you… you were very important to him too. He’d want me to help you.” 

Gabrielle wets her lips a little, like she’s fighting back a physical reaction. Eve can tell that she hasn’t thought of Eli in a very long time, but she knows that he meant as much to her as she meant to him. She knows that Gabrielle might have been his messenger instead had either one of their paths taken a different turn; she was among the very first to follow his path, even if she couldn’t stay on it for very long. They taught each other a great deal, and Eve can’t help thinking it’s fitting that his new messenger takes some time to learn a little from his old one.

“I don’t know,” Gabrielle says, as though oblivious to all of that.

Eve takes her hands, the strong one and the bandaged. “You’ve soaked the sands with blood, Gabrielle. They need time to heal too, just like you do. You can always come back here later, if you feel your work isn’t done.”

“I don’t know.” It sounds like a mantra. “It’s so hard to think.”

Eve can see that’s true. She looks so, so tired.

“Sleep on it,” she offers gently. “You don’t have to decide anything right this second. We’ll both still be here in the morning.”

For a fraction of a second, Gabrielle looks desperately vulnerable. Eve forgets so often that Gabrielle is actually younger than she is, that those twenty-five years flashed by without ever touching her, that it’s only the weight of the world and the scars it left behind that have left her looking so old and so worn. They’ve both been shaped so much beyond their years, Eve thinks, and wonders which of them regrets it more.

After a long moment, Gabrielle meets her eye. “Will we?”

The question is a whisper, close to a whimper, and Eve recognises the deeper meaning behind it. _‘Don’t leave me too,’_ she’s saying. _‘Don’t let me wake up alone again.’_ It’s not really fear, nothing so rational, but it cuts through the lines of grief and loss and turns them into something primal, something that she can’t bite back; it cuts through Eve as well, and leaves her almost breathless for a moment, grasping for the inner peace she has fought so hard to find.

 _You’re not alone now,_ she thinks, though she knows she can’t say it.

“We will,” she says out loud. “I promise.”

*

In the morning, Gabrielle stares at the wall and says, “All right.”

Eve doesn’t know whether to feel relieved by the decision or worried by how carelessly she seems to have made it. Gabrielle’s face is pinched and haggard; it doesn’t take a spiritual guru to deduce that probably she hasn’t slept at all, and it’s hard to tell whether she’s really talking to Eve at all or whether she’s letting her imagination run away again. She supposes it shouldn’t matter either way; so long as she’s doing the right thing, her reasons aren’t important.

Still, it’s troubling that she still won’t look at her, and it’s troubling that she still doesn’t speak to her directly. More than either of those things, though, it’s troubling that even as she says it she’s reaching for the chakram.

Eve beats her to it, plucking the weapon from her belt and setting it to one side before Gabrielle has a chance to slash her hand open again. “You’ll come back to Greece?” she asks, to be sure.

Gabrielle nods. She still looks tired, but there’s a new kind of light behind those too-dry eyes. “I want to visit the Amazons,” she says.

That’s unexpected. It’s also very much unwanted. Eve isn’t exactly welcome in the new Amazon Nation, and with good reason. What she did to their people as Livia isn’t something that can or should be forgiven, and though she is grateful for everything Mother and Gabrielle did to prevent her execution, still there’s a part of her that can’t deny it wanted to see justice done at last. She deserved it, really and truly, and for a very long moment she thought death might be easier than penance.

Perhaps it would have been at the time, but she is fulfilled now in a way she thought she’d never be. Doing Eli’s work, spreading his word and giving comfort to broken souls… she could not have imagined such a life for herself before, but now it feels as natural as breathing. It’s like the world has reshaped her, given her a second chance at life. It sings in her blood, a hymn without words, a kind of worship that needs no words. It’s still penance, but it’s also purpose.

She doesn’t relish the though of going back to the Amazons, of tormenting them with the sight of her and being tormented in turn by the echoes of her past deeds. Those terrible things will always be with her, a cape around her shoulders that she can’t shrug off, but that’s no reason to force it onto the people she’s wronged. Her name is a threat, her face a trauma, and she wouldn’t wish the sight of it on anyone. Varia and her sisters have every right to want her gone from their land, and Eve knows it wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interest for her to return.

“The Amazons,” she repeats, and doesn’t try to mask her doubts.

Gabrielle doesn’t see them, of course. She’s still staring at the wall. “They have rituals,” she says, almost to herself. “They might be able to…”

She trails off, looking uncomfortable. Eve frowns. “To do what?”

Gabrielle turns away from the wall, but she doesn’t look at Eve. She sits down on the bed, hunches forwards until she’s bent almost double. She looks like she’s in pain, holding herself so tight, as though afraid that her body will break apart and dissolve if she doesn’t keep it under hand.

“I want…” She wets her lips. The light in the room is dim at best; it casts long, heavy shadows across her face. “They might know a way to get rid of this thing. This… this _thing_ …” She leans over a little more, giving Eve a visceral view of the dragon on her back. “I want it gone.”

Eve studies the lines, the colours, the ink under the skin. It’s beautiful and frightful at the same time, and she’s not sure what to think about it. She doesn’t know where it came from — _Jappa_ , they say, but that doesn’t tell her the story — and she can tell by the way Gabrielle talks about it, the strain in her voice and the tension in her shoulders, that it’s connected to Mother somehow, that there is a violent, vicious conflict between the part of her that wants it gone and the quieter part that wants to remember. It must be deeply personal for her to feel that way, and it’s a kind of honour that Eve is allowed to see it.

“Are you sure?” she asks, cautious but very serious.

“Yeah.” Gabrielle is shaking, as though she’s fighting tears or some more primal reaction. Her eyes are too dry for tears, and Eve doesn’t want to wonder what else she might be fighting. “I want them _both_ gone. I want them out of me.”

Eve glances down. Gabrielle’s second tattoo is much smaller than the dragon, covering only one side of her calf, but just as beautiful in its own way. It’s a fish, stylised almost beyond recognition, and it stands out starkly against the pale skin. The two look very different, one colourful and one heavily shaded, but they’re both as mesmeric as each other.

“They must have taken a very long time,” Eve muses softly.

“Too long,” Gabrielle says. She’s not speaking to Eve, but she’s not really speaking to the air this time either. She’s just speaking. “They were supposed to protect me.”

Eve touches the fish on her leg. “Did they?”

Gabrielle swats her hand away, covers the ink with her own. She rakes her nails over the surface a couple of times, leaving needling white scores over the darker shades, then straightens up. She does look at Eve this time, and the heat in her eyes almost scalds her.

“No,” she says. “Not when it mattered.”

*

On Gabrielle’s insistence, they leave without a word to the villagers she saved.

Neither one of them has many possessions to speak of, and little reason to stick around once the decision is made. Gabrielle is edgy, uncomfortable leaving a place whose future is so uncertain, and she doesn’t want the added burden of having to bid them all farewell. Eve reassures her, using vague mostly-truths, that Rome won’t venture any more losses here now that they’ve been bested twice. There are too few gains in a setting so remote, and they’ve already spent too much to make another feint worth their while. They will move on, she promises softly; Gabrielle has done all she possibly can.

If the deepening lines on her face are any measure to go by, Gabrielle is not convinced.

The journey is a simple one, cutting a mostly straight line through land and sea alike. They don’t have much money, but Eli’s voice has reached far enough by now that Eve is easily recognised as his messenger. Experience has taught her that there are few people more suspicious than sailors, and it doesn’t take much effort to convince a jittery captain that having her aboard would be a blessing more valuable than any coin.

Gabrielle gets a few curious looks, the chakram and the tattoos both drawing unwanted attention. She storms below deck before they set sail, perhaps afraid of what she’ll do if she lets herself react, and doesn’t resurface until they’re close to land.

Eve thinks about chasing after her, keeping her company and offering some comfort if she needs or wants it. It’s not that she doesn’t trust her to stay out of trouble; it’s just that she’s seen the dark places Gabrielle can go when she feels alone. It hurts her heart to look at her, to see her jaw clench, to stop her before she puts her hand on the wrong part of the chakram, as though she can pour Mother back into herself if she just lets enough blood. More than anything, Eve wants to keep those things in check before they can become habits.

She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t go after her, and she doesn’t offer company. Gabrielle knows where to find her if she wants it, and in any case Eve rather hopes that she’ll sulk herself to sleep if she’s left to her own devices for long enough. Doubtful though it is, hope springs eternal. It’s no secret that she doesn’t travel on water particularly well, and given the ghosts she’s carrying around in her head right now Eve anticipates the worst.

In any case, she has her own feelings to work through, and for all that she wants to help she finds herself selfishly grateful for the solitude and freedom to reflect.

It’s difficult, even now, to reconcile the woman she knows as Xena with the image she carries in her heart, the mother that she never truly knew. It’s harder still to look inside herself and realise that now she’ll never know her at all, that twenty-five wasted years expanded and swelled and now the chance is gone forever. It’s hard to mourn for a woman she barely got to know, but it’s all too easy to mourn for the love, the opportunities and the memories they’ll never share.

Eve can’t say with any measure of honesty that she will miss her mother. She could probably count on one hand the number of weeks they spent together. The whole world sings songs of the famed warrior princess, but her own daughter knows barely anything about her. It seems so wrong, but at the same time she can’t imagine it being any other way. Their paths were never meant to connect for very long; the gods made sure of that, years before Mother turned around and killed them all.

Now, in truth, all Eve has to cling to, all she has to _mourn_ , is the shadow of a woman she never knew and the love she learned too late. She mourns the idea of Mother far more than the woman herself.

In all of this, she thinks, maybe that is the true tragedy.

*

Back on Greek soil, they both have their doubts.

Eve doesn’t give voice to hers, but they ring inside her head like a chant. Greece isn’t her home, nor has it ever been, and she feels like an imposter standing here and staking a claim to this place just because it was her mother’s. She feels oddly suspended here, not part of this place but not truly a Roman any more either. She is only who she is, the messenger of Eli, nationless and nameless.

Gabrielle’s concerns are much closer to the surface. Eve knows that she hasn’t eaten or slept in some time, but that’s not enough to explain the pallor of her skin, or the new lines running so deep across her face. Greece might be a home to her in a way it’s never been to Eve, but it’s also a memory; every turn is a keen new blade slipped between her ribs, and every glint of the sun casts a fresh shadow on the love and the life she’s lost, the world that was ripped out of her hands. From the moment they disembark, she becomes a raw, open wound.

“You don’t have to come,” she says to Eve, when they’ve been walking for a couple of hours. “I know you and Varia have a history. You brought me back to Greece like you wanted. You don’t have to…”

“I want to,” Eve says, cutting her off before she can make the offer and make it too tempting. “Gabrielle, you’re all I have left of my mother. Being with you… this is as close as I’m ever going to get to being with her again.”

That strikes a painful chord. Gabrielle flinches and trembles. Her shoulders are tight again, the dragon writhing across the skin of her back.

“I’m nothing like her,” she whispers, hoarse like she’s been screaming, or perhaps like she’s been trying not to. “She’d be the first one to tell you that.”

“Are you sure?” Eve asks. It’s not an accusation, but it doesn’t surprise her when Gabrielle reacts as if it was. “Gabrielle, when I found you, you were pulling her chakram out of a dead soldier. It was soaked with blood.”

“They were going to take that village.” She’s still trembling, though, as though her body won’t allow her to commit to the words. “What was I supposed to do? Turn my back and do nothing? Let them kill and maim, conquer and pillage and—”

“I don’t know,” Eve says, cutting her off with sharp honesty. “Mother is usually the one who makes the hard choices. I understand how hard it must be for you, trying to do these things without her. But she wouldn’t want you to lose yourself in it.”

“I’ve already lost myself.” It’s a simple statement, like _‘it’s going to rain’_. “I can’t remember the last time I looked in the mirror and recognised my own face. I lost myself long before your mother died and left me alone.”

“Maybe,” Eve says. “But it’s harder now, isn’t it? It’s harder without her there to balance you.” She doesn’t realise just how much the words mean to her until they’re out. “She was your whole world, Gabrielle. She—”

“She _is_ my whole world,” Gabrielle counters, hard and angry. “That’s not changed just because she’s gone.”

Eve studies her for a long, weighted moment. She is so pale, face so gaunt and worn. She looks like she’s been carrying that world around on her shoulders for a decade, not just a couple of weeks. Eve wants more than anything to ease that burden, to take some of it away and keep it for herself.

 _She should have been my world too,_ she thinks, and it’s hard not to be bitter.

She’s not her world. She never was, and she never will be, and Eve doesn’t know how to help Gabrielle find herself again when her whole world is a place that Eve has never called home.

*

The sun has long since set by the time they stop.

With no visibility making camp is a necessity, but that doesn’t stop Gabrielle resisting. She wants to keep going, wants to walk through the night and the next morning, wants to walk until her legs give out under her and she collapses. She won’t, not with Eve here to prevent it, but she wants to.

Eve has seen this kind of dogged determination before. She’s seen young soldiers return from a bloody war only to drive themselves into the ground in meaningless menial labours. She’s watched her own troops exhaust themselves beyond the reach of any healer, working themselves down to the bone, because the alternative — stopping to rest and letting themselves _feel_ — is by far more terrifying than running headlong into the grave.

Gabrielle is like that now, so afraid of her own emotions that she would sooner die too than listen to them. She might well have done so, Eve thinks, if their paths hadn’t crossed, but Eve will not allow such a thing. She has already lost one mother; she will not lose another.

“Lie down,” she says, and it’s not a suggestion.

Gabrielle doesn’t move, but she doesn’t struggle too much when Eve takes her by the shoulders and eases her down onto the ground. Her limbs are heavy, but they yield under Eve’s hands as though by muscle memory, as though they’re remembering a time, not so long ago, when someone else would lay her down just like this, when she would let herself fall open, weaknesses all exposed, for Mother’s eyes only.

Eve is not Mother, and she can’t care for Gabrielle the way she would have, though for a moment she almost forgets that Gabrielle thinks of herself in those terms too. They’re very close in age, closer to each other than either one of them ever was to Mother; twenty-five years in an ice cave and another in the Norse lands have stripped away so much of Gabrielle’s experience in the very same breath they poured it down Eve’s throat.

Gabrielle is much more worldly, though, and in a way that even Livia never was. She’s seen so much, been to almost every corner of the world, and she’s grown so much from the young idealist she used to be. Livia was always destined for greatness; Eve, in her stead, had greatness thrust upon her. In both her names and lives, she never had to work for anything. It makes it easy to imagine that Gabrielle truly is the older one, that she truly is wiser.

She doesn’t look old or wise right now. She lies down on her stomach in the grass, forehead resting heavily on her arms, and when she turns her head to look at Eve she is so lost, so desperate to be guided and told what to do.

Eve doesn’t like telling people what to do, but she has learned on her travels the subtle art of giving people the thing they think they need. She’s played so many roles as Eli’s voice, and it’s no challenge at all to play this one now, to lean in close and say, “Breathe slowly.”

Gabrielle shakes her head. Her shoulders are shuddering.

Eve rests her palms over them a moment, flat and steady, and lets her own breathing catch a rhythm she wants Gabrielle to follow with hers. She doubts it’ll work — she might not know Gabrielle as well as Mother did, but she knows all about her stubborn streak — but she tries just the same. Gabrielle is still shaking, little tremors that ripple through her body, and Eve lets her hands journey down past her shoulders now, over and across her back, fingertips finding the painted lines of the dragon, its scales, its wings, its claws.

“Don’t.” Gabrielle’s voice is wracked. “Eve, don’t touch it.”

Eve does touch it, though. A part of her expected to find the ink still wet, or perhaps to find the skin burning, but it’s not. The tattooed places feel exactly the same as the rest of her, as smooth and cool as her shoulders or her stomach. It’s as though the ink isn’t there at all, and in spite of herself Eve finds that she’s in awe of it.

“You said it was supposed to protect you,” she muses softly.

“I don’t care.” Gabrielle wrenches, twisting urgently under her hands. “It wasn’t enough, was it? It couldn’t save her.”

“But it saved _you_ ,” Eve reminds her. “Isn’t that something?”

“I don’t want to be saved,” Gabrielle says. Her muscles contract, spasming; the jolt makes the dragon seem to leap. “I don’t want to be protected if I can’t be with her. I don’t want to be reminded of what I couldn’t do.” She struggles out of Eve’s grip, eyes alight with grief but still so impossibly dry. “I don’t want it. I want it gone. I…”

“Gabrielle.” Eve keeps her voice even, her breathing rhythmic. She wants to pour what peace she has into the ink on Gabrielle’s back, to remind her of a time when she had a peace of her own. “You can’t just erase—”

“ _Eve_.” It’s a choked-off groan, the kind of sound that says she wants to cry but she won’t. She hasn’t cried at all, Eve realises, since she found her. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do. I’ve had enough of that to last a lifetime.”

Eve sighs, but nods and pulls away. Gabrielle sits up, hunching her shoulders again. Eve wonders if she realises how much it exposes her back when she sits like that, if she knows how utterly on display the dragon is, wings and claws flaring as she shifts. She wants to touch it again, to soothe the tension under the skin, but she knows not to. What she sees in those beautiful colours isn’t what Gabrielle does, and she’s not in a place where she can open her eyes and see something new, see the sweeter memories waiting beneath the painted scales and bared teeth.

“It won’t feel like this forever,” she says. “You might wake up one day and be grateful it’s there to remind you.”

Gabrielle shakes her head again, bending almost in half to rest her forehead on her knees. She’s so sure that the world is fixed, that what she feels here and now is the only thing she ever will. It breaks Eve’s heart; she’s seen people like this so many times. She’s lost count of the souls she’s counselled, broken-down by broken hearts, so sure that all the light in the world has been extinguished, unable to imagine even a single candle bringing a little back. She’s seen it so, so many times… but never in someone who once radiated that light herself.

“I don’t want to be reminded,” Gabrielle says. “I don’t want to remember that she chose death over me.”

Eve knows that she means it today. Neither of them can say for sure if she will tomorrow. “Gabrielle…”

“No.” She sounds like a child, angry and frightened at the same time; Eve doesn’t know how to break through to her. “Don’t try and talk me out of this, Eve. I _will_ find a way to get rid of it. I _will_ make my body mine again.”

She’s not really talking about her body, Eve knows. It’s her heart she really wants back, and the other parts of her that are still so dedicated to Mother, that were wrapped around her as tightly as the dragon clings to her back now. Maybe she realises that, or maybe she doesn’t; Eve knows that Gabrielle once saw herself as a bard and she can’t imagine that the symbolism would be lost on her, but grief can do the most terrible things. Looking at her face now, tight and twisted as it is, it’s hard to imagine she ever saw poetry in anything.

Eve wants to tell her that it’s not as simple as she wants it to be. Even if the Amazons do know of some magical way to rend the ink from under her skin, she knows that it won’t do anything to balm the pain beneath. Perhaps Gabrielle will get her body back and perhaps she won’t, but either way it won’t undo the loss she’s been through, and it won’t erase the grief inside of her. Whatever happens to her body, her heart needs to heal on its own.

She doesn’t tell her that. Why hurt her when she’s already suffering so much? If Gabrielle needs to cling to some unreasonable expectation to get her through tonight, so be it. Delusions can be precious things, Eve knows, to a soul that has nothing else, and though there is a place inside her where she hopes to guide Gabrielle through this without needless Amazon rituals, she knows that it will take time. If this is what she wants, if this is what she needs to cling to until then… well, it’s better than the alternative.

“You should get some sleep,” she says.

Gabrielle just stares at her.

*

Neither of them get any sleep.

Gabrielle spends the night talking to the air, murmuring and whispering in low tones, as though afraid of waking Eve, as though she could sleep through such a thing at all. Grief lances her voice, shuddering through her body, and though Eve is tired she can’t bring herself to even try and sleep with so much pain so close. She doesn’t say anything herself, knowing perfectly well what this is really about, but she listens carefully, and Gabrielle’s voice alone is enough to lash her heart.

It’s a strange kind of delusion, the kind that comes with self-awareness. Gabrielle knows that she’s talking to the air — every time Eve broaches the subject, she sighs and says _“I know,”_ as though waiting for the other shoe to drop — but that doesn’t stop her giving in to it again and again. Eve doesn’t know what to make of it, whether it requires an intervention or whether it’s best to just let the moments run their course once they’ve started.

“I don’t care,” she’s saying, the words gritted out through tightly clenched teeth. “I don’t _care_ , Xena. If you’re not here, I don’t want it. I don’t need anyone to protect me. I only need _you_.”

Eve stills her breath. It takes a great deal of effort not to sigh.

“It’s _her_ fault,” Gabrielle goes on, hissing, as though in response to something Eve can’t hear. She always sounds so small when she’s angry. “She took you away from me. She made you choose death. She made you obsessed with being honourable and she took you away! So I… I don’t want her ‘protection’, Xena. Not any more. I don’t want her mark on me, and I don’t want her ink under my skin. I don’t want any part of her anywhere near me.”

Eve doesn’t understand the story behind that. She’s managed to glean a few details here and there, but never anything solid enough to paint a proper picture. She knows that Mother had an old friend, possibly a former lover, that the two of them were ghosts for a time to stop some terrible evil, that this girl is the one who drew the tattoos, who marked Gabrielle’s skin for protection. She’s got that much in bits and pieces, snatches of conversation she’s dragged out of Gabrielle in vulnerable moments, but she doesn’t know anything more. It’s not easy for someone like her, someone who has built her life on forgiveness and repentance, to understand why Gabrielle would want to reject a gift like that.

“It’s not a _gift_ ,” Gabrielle says, as though she can hear Eve’s thoughts. “It _was_ a gift. But that was before she let me run off thinking I could still save you.”

Eve swallows. She doesn’t have context, but the grief-strangled rasp to Gabrielle’s voice fills in a lot of blanks.

“She _knew_ , Xena!” Gabrielle goes on. If the hour wasn’t so late, Eve suspects she’d be screaming. “She knew you couldn’t come back to me. She _knew_ you’d have to… she knew you…” She shakes her head; her whole body seizes in a sort of spasm that passes as quickly as it starts. “But she let me believe it anyway. She let me go off to try and save you. She made me see what they’d done to you. She made me see your body… your severed head… she let me go through all that, even though she knew it didn’t matter, even though she knew you could never come back.” She laughs, high and bitter. “Some gift, Xena, huh? Some _gift_.”

Eve feels a clenching in her heart. She wonders, briefly, if Gabrielle knows that she’s awake, if she realises she’s telling her everything. Perhaps she does; perhaps this is the only way she feels she can tell this story, the only way she can tell Eve exactly what happened to her mother. She can’t say any of this in conversation; she can barely answer Eve’s questions even when they’re simple. Every time she tries, she loses her voice and chokes on things she can’t swallow down. Saying it like this, under the pretence of speaking to a dead ghost… maybe that makes this easier.

“I have to get rid of it,” Gabrielle says. “I have to get rid of _her_. Xena, it has to be just you and me. The way it was supposed to be. The way it should still be. It has to be like that. I have to… Xena, I _have to_ …”

She doesn’t finish. She’s still not crying, but Eve can hear the tears in her throat; they strangle her voice until there’s nothing left of it, until she couldn’t continue even if she wanted to. Her shoulders heave, great wracking shudders that roll through her like waves on the ocean, like storms shaking the world below. She’s trying so, so hard not to cry, and that makes Eve want to weep for them both.

She wants to go to her. She wants to wrap her arms around her, the way she does to the faithful when they’re in pain, the way she does to the faithless when they’re lost. She wants to tell her, again, that she won’t always feel like this, that the sun will rise on her heart again one day.

She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t, because hearing all this for the first time makes her own heart ache as well, makes the midnight dark feel darker still, endless and empty all around her. Gabrielle isn’t one of the faceless, nameless souls Eve has preached to and tried to enlighten; she’s her _family_ , and the loss that’s left her heart in pieces is her _mother_. The loss is Eve’s as well, and hearing her name cuts through her as well.

She hasn’t earned the right to mourn as wholly or completely as Gabrielle. She knows that all too well, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Her heart is fragile too, easy though it is to forget sometimes when she’s wrapping herself up in Eli’s silken words, and she is taken aback by how powerfully the sorrow courses through her now.

 _Oh, Mother,_ she thinks, and blinks back tears. _You left us too soon._

*


	3. Chapter 3

*

They don’t eat breakfast.

Gabrielle is very insistent about that. She’s restless, eager to reach the Amazons’ village as soon as possible. Eve has enough foresight not to argue, though she very much wants to; she hasn’t seen Gabrielle eat anything since they left the desert lands for Greece, and that’s several days ago now. She must be eating something, just as she must be getting some sleep somehow, or else her body would have given up long before now, but Eve suspects that in both cases it’s not even close to enough.

She doesn’t say anything about it. She doesn’t know Gabrielle as well as she should, or even as well as she’d like, but she knows enough to know that she’s wilful and disobedient, that even if she were on the brink of collapse she wouldn’t give Eve the satisfaction of thinking she talked her into it. Eve remembers all too well the sea voyage to Mogador, so long ago now. Gabrielle was so angry, half-blind with her thirst for vengeance; Eve tried to warn her of the danger, but she wouldn’t hear a word of it.

She and Mother both paid the price for that, for better or worse. Eve has no intention of letting history repeat itself now, of letting Gabrielle fall prey once again to her wilful pride. Better for them both to simply watch and be there to catch her if and when she falls.

It’s only a few hours’ travel before they arrive on Amazon land. Gabrielle lights up at the sight of the village as it draws close; her shoulders lose just a little of their tightness, and her gait becomes stronger, as though she’s been injected with a bolt of new strength, something more potent than food or sleep. For the first time in days she looks like something more than a ghost of her former self. Eve only wishes she had a better reason.

For her part, Eve isn’t nearly so enthused. She’s no friend to the Amazons, after all, and the last time their paths crossed she barely made it out with her life. Varia and her kin might have pardoned her once, but not even Eve is naïve enough to believe that makes them friends, or even allies. Even in this, united in mourning for Mother and caring for Gabrielle, she does not expect warmth. The best she can hope for is that Varia will set aside their personal differences for Gabrielle’s sake.

She does. It takes a few moments for the reality to sink in, but when it does she yields almost immediately. She sees Eve first, of course, the self-styled ‘Bitch of Rome’ and opens her mouth with an insult or a threat, but then her eyes catch Gabrielle’s and the words die unspoken on her tongue. Eve is gracious enough to mask her relief, but not by much.

She isn’t exactly familiar with the Amazons and their society, but she definitely recognises the look that floods Varia’s face when she meets Gabrielle’s eye for the first time. She’s not much happier to see her than she is to see Eve, but where Eve’s presence fills her with righteousness and rage the sight of Gabrielle seems to fill her with something like shame. Eve doesn’t understand it, but of course it’s not her place to. She can only stand in silence and try to be invisible.

“What happened?” Varia asks Gabrielle, without preamble.

It’s telling, painfully so, that she doesn’t even bother to ask _‘where’s Xena?’_. She either knows, or she’s guessed it from the look on Gabrielle’s face.

Gabrielle, of course, is looking through her, as though she doesn’t see her at all. “I need to speak to Cyane.”

She says it like she’s talking to a ghost, like Varia is no more corporeal than the visions she’s been seeing of Mother. Varia, naturally, bristles at that, the request as much as the inattention.

“Cyane?” she echoes. “Gabrielle, I’m the queen—”

“You tried to kill me,” Gabrielle says, quiet but without accusation. Eve raises a brow, but knows better than to ask right now. “And you can’t help me with what I need. Cyane can.”

Eve looks from one to the other. She’s not sure she’ll find a friend in either of them at the moment, and if the truth be told she’s not sure she wants to. It’s been too long since she got in touch with the part of her that is unforgiving of her past sins. She could stand to remember the lives she took and the ones she tormented, and the flush of fury on Varia’s face is a sobering, welcome reminder. Livia might be as good as dead, but her deeds will live on for the rest of Eve’s life.

Varia ignores her completely. She’s staring at Gabrielle, an odd look on her face. Her eyes linger on her face for a moment, then lower to her torso, recognising in the same way Eve did the way she’s grown thin over the last few weeks. She lingers there for a beat or two, lips pursing, then lets her gaze drift lower still, until it finds the fish on her calf, half-covered by her boot but visible just the same. Eve wonders if she knows the story that tattoo tells, and if she knows that there’s a much larger one coiled and stretched across her back.

After a long moment, Varia shrugs and cocks her thumb over her shoulder. “She’s in her hut.”

Gabrielle doesn’t thank her. She doesn’t speak at all, and when she turns around to leave, exposing the dragon on her back, Varia doesn’t bother to hide her gasp.

“Don’t,” Eve says, quick, before she can ask the terrible question.

Varia glares at her, eyes suddenly narrowed. “You were forgiven,” she growls, making forgiveness into a threat. “That doesn’t mean you’re welcome among us, _Livia_. Why did you come back?”

Eve watches the dragon writhe as Gabrielle stalks off to Cyane’s hut. “For her.”

*

She tells the story, as much as she knows of it.

It’s more for Gabrielle’s sake than her own. She knows perfectly well that Varia doesn’t want to hear a word from her, that she’s keeping her in sight because she doesn’t trust her, not because she wants to hear anything she has to say for herself, but she feels that she owes it to Gabrielle not to have to tell her terrible truth more than once. She is crippled by her grief, in a way that Varia probably knows far more intimately than she’d ever admit, and Eve feels strangely protective of them both.

“That’s a shame,” Varia says, when Eve is finished. She doesn’t tell her it’s none of her business, and she doesn’t shout at her for telling someone else’s story. It’s unexpected, but definitely not unwelcome. “Xena was… well, I owe her a lot. More than I want to say.”

What she really means is _‘more than I want to say to a bitch like you’_.

Eve has enough self-awareness to accept that, to concede the reason and the heartbreak behind that, and she doesn’t take it too personally. “I don’t know much about it,” she admits. “Gabrielle’s… well, she’s not really herself.”

“Thanks for stating the obvious,” Varia grunts. Though she’s accepting it, at least on the surface, she clearly doesn’t approve of needing to have this conversation with Eve. “I don’t suppose she told you what she wants with Cyane?”

Eve flounders a little. She doesn’t know whether to tell the truth, or to respect Gabrielle’s privacy and leave her the choice to tell it or not. It’s a very personal thing, she knows, not just the tattoos themselves but Gabrielle’s reasons for wanting them gone. Eve can’t help thinking she should give the whole thing more thought than she has, but it’s not her place to say so, no more than it’s Varia’s place to learn these things from an outsider.

Varia is looking at her with bared teeth. _This is my tribe,_ she says without words. _This is my home. You’re a guest here, and you will do as I say._ If it were anyone but Eve, that glare might have worked. It is Eve, though, and their history colours any threat either one of them can make.

“You’ll have to ask her,” she says after a moment.

“I’m asking _you_ ,” Varia snaps. Her eyes flash, almost sharper than her teeth. “Don’t make me regret sparing your life.”

The reminder is a pointed blow, aimed very low, and Eve doesn’t appreciate it. She keeps her expression steady, her smile cool and her eyes warm, and she doesn’t let it show that the wound still stings, that her guilt is a razor held to her neck, a blade that will probably never grow dull. What she did here, what she did to these women, and to Varia in particular, is a sin she’ll never be able to atone for. She has to carry the weight of it for the rest of her life, and it is heavy enough without those sharp teeth threatening to tear at her.

“From my experience,” she says, with as much sweetness as she can muster, “sparing a life is not the sort of thing one should ever regret.”

Varia snarls. “Not like _taking_ one, you mean?” It comes out hot. “Or a thousand. I guess you’d know something about that.”

“I do,” Eve says. “I don’t deny my past sins. You know that. But you did forgive me for the one I committed against you. I know that doesn’t make up for it, but you can’t hold it over my head every time our paths converge. It’ll destroy you too, if you do.”

“Don’t you try and pull that holier-than-thou crap here,” Varia counters, spiteful. “It’s no more welcome on Amazon land than you are.”

Eve nods. “I’m only here for Gabrielle,” she says. “I promise you that. As soon as she gets what she needs here, I’ll leave.” She glances back the way they came. The path seems far away now. “You have my word.”

Varia turns to Cyane’s hut. It’s silent, ominous, and the sight of it clearly makes her uncomfortable; for the first time in as long as Eve’s known her the anger bleeds out, just a little, from her face. She knows that it will return, as violent and spiteful as ever, the moment she turns back and sees her again, but while she’s looking elsewhere, while her eyes and her thoughts are with Gabrielle, she seems almost tender.

It makes a new kind of hope spring up inside Eve, a flickering of potential. They are worlds apart, the former Bitch of Rome and one of the people she wronged so unforgivably, but in this at least their interests converge. For all her hot-headedness and quickness to violence, Varia cares deeply for all of her Amazon sisters, and though she seemed to have no qualm about beating her senseless she does count Gabrielle among them. She cares for her too, whether she’ll admit it or not, and that brings her and Eve together.

Their differences and disagreements, great and terrible though they are, will always come second to the people they care about. Eve doesn’t like Varia — she did once, if rather briefly, but it’s difficult for even the messenger of peace to recover from a death sentence — but she respects her passion and her fervour. She respects the things she feels and the things she does, and she hopes that the feeling, much like the dislike, is mutual.

At the very least, it seems to be enough for now. When Varia turns back to her, some moments later, her trademark spite has dissipated almost completely, until only the tenderness remains.

“All right,” she says. “You stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours.”

*

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

The trouble with having a place where their interests converge is that their paths often do as well. Gabrielle spends a long, long time hidden away with Cyane in her hut, and Varia and Eve spend all of that time staring by turns at the closed door and each other. It’s awkward; Varia scowls and snarls, like it’s Eve’s fault they’re taking so long, and Eve can only sigh, painfully aware of how uncomfortable the whole situation is.

It’s evening when they finally emerge, both of them tight-faced and uneasy. Cyane takes Varia off to one side, speaking to her in hushed whispers, and Gabrielle returns to Eve’s side.

“She says she’ll try,” she says, answering the question before Eve has a chance to ask it. “There’s a ritual she was taught in her former tribe.” She turns away from a moment, as though ashamed. “She says it might be painful…”

Eve knows, all too well, what _‘might’_ really means.

“Gabrielle.” She touches the bandage on her hand, and tries not to sigh. “I don’t think…”

“I know you don’t.” She’s staring down at the fish on her leg, and when she pulls her hand out of Eve’s grip it tenses immediately into a fist. “You don’t have to. It’s not about you, Eve. Maybe it should be, but it’s not.”

Eve shakes her head. “No, it shouldn’t be.” She winces. “It’s not about that. You know it’s not. I just don’t want you to put yourself through this kind of pain… and I don’t want you to do something you might regret.”

“I’ve regretted my decisions before,” Gabrielle says, hollow and lonely. “I survived then. I’ll survive now.”

_That’s not the point,_ Eve thinks, but she doesn’t say so out loud. It’s true that the choice is Gabrielle’s, that it really isn’t about her at all, but it still cuts to the bone to see her like this, to hear her say _“it might be painful”_ without even blinking, as though the idea of pain is almost as comforting as the the idea of being freed from the ink beneath her skin, as though even she doesn’t truly understand what this is about.

“I don’t want to see you in pain,” Eve says again, because it’s the one thing Gabrielle hasn’t countered.

“You don’t have to,” Gabrielle tells her. It’s not exactly what Eve wanted to hear, but it’s hard not to smile at the look on her face, a moment of almost-sympathy lending her face a flush of colour. “I’ll understand if you want to go.”

“No,” Eve says, a little too fast. “I’ll see it through. I don’t have to agree with you to do that.”

Gabrielle nods. Her face is still paler than it should be, but at least now Eve recognises it as hers. “Thank you.”

Eve remembers the last time they stood here like this, the two of them among the Amazons. It was a joyous farewell, or as close to one as any of them could have hoped for. Eve embraced Gabrielle then, with warmth and sincerity, and said _“I’m forever in your debt”_. Gabrielle laughed at that, as though she couldn’t possibly fathom such a thing, as though her whole life truly did revolve around Mother’s happiness, so inextricably tied to her own.

The thought makes Eve ache now. She doesn’t know how to make any of this right, and it’s hard not to feel like a failure every time she fails. In truth, though, she’s not entirely sure it _should_ be made right. Knowing Gabrielle as she does, perhaps there’s a kinder comfort in letting this injustice stand, in letting her see it through the eyes of the wronged.

_“You don’t owe me anything,”_ Gabrielle told her, the last time they stood here like this. Now it’s Eve’s turn to tell her the same thing. She feels warm, lit up with the same sincerity, the same honesty she felt in Gabrielle’s arms during that too-brief goodbye. Gabrielle meant it then, and Eve means it now.

This time, though, they don’t touch each other at all.

*

The Amazons have a ceremony for everything.

They gather at precisely sundown for the evening meal, settling in groups around small tables in what seems to be a sort of communal exercise. Gabrielle, holding the title from an age years past, is allowed to share the queens’ table, keeping company with Varia, Cyane, and a number of others that Eve doesn’t immediately recognise. Eve isn’t really comfortable breaking bread with any one of them, but Gabrielle is pale and visibly uncomfortable, and she seems to take some small solace in having her close by.

Varia, of course, ignores her completely. “Cyane tells me you want to get rid of them,” she says to Gabrielle, gesturing at the fish and the dragon.

Gabrielle looks down at the ground. Her head tilts in the slightest of nods. “If I can.”

Varia grunts; she doesn’t look particularly surprised. “I hear it’s pretty brutal,” she says. “You sure you’ve got the stomach for it?”

Eve sucks in her breath. How can they speak about this so brazenly? How can they say words like _‘painful’_ and _‘brutal’_ as if there’s nothing strange or terrible in them at all, as if it’s not a torture to put yourself through them?

“Only one way to find out,” Gabrielle quips. She’s wry, but not smiling. “I survived a bout with you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but only because I went easy on you.” Varia, on the other hand, is definitely smiling. “Xena was already pissed at me. Didn’t want to risk her going for my throat if I roughed you up too much.”

“She did that anyway,” Gabrielle says. Her voice trembles just a little, but Varia doesn’t seem to notice.

“Well, sure, but that was different. And how would you know? Weren’t you unconscious?”

“ _Varia_.” Cyane clears her throat, subtle but deliberate. It doesn’t take an expert in Amazon politics to realise that she’s taken on the role of peacemaker. “Of all the things you two could reminisce about, is this really the wisest—”

“We’re Amazons, Cyane,” Varia interrupts. “Not whimpering babies. Right, Gabrielle?”

Gabrielle swallows, but can’t seem to find the words. Eve feels her temper flare at the sight of her. How does Varia not see the pain? How does she think this is a good thing to talk about? 

Eve doesn’t lose her temper very often any more, but when she does, it’s often irrepressible at best. There’s not much room for heightened emotion in an enlightened heart, and less still for anger on the path of love, so she has more pent-up feelings than she’d probably care to admit. She’s become an expert in pushing down the rage, in turning the other cheek and letting her enemies strike the one they see. Still, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do that now, and she feels the old familiar anger in her chest again, a heat as powerful as anything that took her when she was Livia.

“Varia…” she hisses, dangerous. “Gabrielle has just lost her—”

“Eve, stop.” Gabrielle’s breathing is ragged. “She’s right. This is how they do things here. Amazons don’t hide their pain, they celebrate it. It’s one of the reasons why I came.”

Eve is struck. The revelation stings more than she’d care to admit. “What does that mean?”

“It’s none of your business,” Varia snaps, a knife-edge just searching for a vein. “Livi— _Eve_. You might be Gabrielle’s guest at this table, but you have no right to speak. Hold your tongue, or take it somewhere else.”

Eve doesn’t like that sound of that, and not just because it’s undermining. She’s seen the sort of pain Gabrielle has been ‘celebrating’ since Mother’s death, and she doesn’t think that’s something that should be encouraged, least of all by someone as violent and hot-headed as Varia. Knowing her tendencies for needless brutality, Eve can’t help thinking that coming here now might have been a bad idea. Still, she can’t say so, because Gabrielle is looking up at her with wide, hopeful eyes, showing more feeling now than she has in the days it took them to reach this place.

“It’s all right, Eve,” she says, very softly. “You don’t have to understand this. Just know that it’s what I need, all right?”

It’s not all right. It’s as far from all right as anything can be. Still, though, Eve nods her assent, because the look on Gabrielle’s face is devastating, like Eve is the only thing keeping her from breaking down right here in front of her Amazon sisters. Eve doesn’t need to know Gabrielle as well as she does to know that she’d sooner die herself than face with that kind of shame. It’s for Gabrielle’s sake that she silences herself, and for her sake that she stays and doesn’t fight. There is no place for Livia here, only for Eve.

“All right,” she mutters, as quietly as she can, then turns away before she can regret it too much.

“Anyway,” Cyane is saying, in a blithe bid at turning the conversation back to where it started. “I don’t even know if it’ll work. My tribe hasn’t been called on to use these techniques in generations. Those tattoos… they’re not exactly common, you understand?”

Gabrielle grunts. “No, they’re not.”

Cyane nods, then sighs. “I don’t even know if I’m capable of…” She trails off, takes a quick bite of her meal, then tries again. “I was very young when I inherited the name, and the title of queen. I never had a chance to learn…” She shakes her head, visibly upset by her lack of experience. “It _will_ be painful. That, I can promise you. Whether or not it will remove them, or do so with any kind of permanence, I really can’t say.”

“That’s all right,” Gabrielle says.

It’s not, though. It’s definitely, definitely not.

“There’s honour in it,” Varia muses, almost to herself. Horrifyingly, she sounds like she means that. “Putting yourself through an ordeal like that. Cleansing your body of the grief and the regret that taint it.” Eve has never heard her sound so spiritual before, or so deathly serious; it’s a shame that the subject matter is so brutal, or else she’d find herself a little awed. “I forget sometimes, Gabrielle, that you weren’t born one of us.”

Gabrielle chuckles. It’s a wet, raspy sound, like she has a soaked rag caught in her throat. “Believe me,” she says, “I wasn’t.”

“There’s no shame in that,” Cyane says. “Some of our most respected elders were brought into our tribe by right of caste.” She looks down, pensive, as though remembering, and for a moment or two Gabrielle looks almost like she’s at home. “It’s an honour to have you with us, anyway,” she continues at last. “My people speak so highly of you. I mean… you _and_ Xena…”

She adds Mother’s name as an addendum, but it makes Gabrielle flinch.

“She… she deserves that praise more than I do.” The confession comes hard, Eve can tell. “It’s not her I want to get rid of,” she adds, as though anyone at the table would ever accuse her of wanting such a thing. “It’s her _death_. It’s the way she… it’s…”

Cyane frowns at her for a long moment, characteristically contemplative, then turns away out of respect. “I’m sure it was an honourable one,” she says. “Xena was always honourable.”

“It…” Gabrielle swallows, once then twice more. She was already pale; now she looks like a ghost. “She…”

“Gabrielle.” Without thinking, Eve touches her arm. “Gab—”

“Be silent,” Varia interrupts. She stops herself before she can strike her, but it’s close. “Gabrielle, Xena’s deeds speak for themselves. Whether she died honourably or not…”

“She thought she did.” She blurts it out in a terrible rush. “She thought she was saving forty thousand souls.”

Varia whistles, visibly impressed. “She never was much for subtlety.”

_Stop this,_ Eve thinks, enraged by bound to silence. _Stop talking about my mother like you knew her. Stop talking to Gabrielle like you have any idea how much pain she’s in right now. You have no more right to talk about my mother than I do to sit at your stupid ‘Amazons only’ table. You have no right to talk to her like that, and you have no idea to tell her there’s ‘honour’ in this ridiculous idea of hers. There isn’t. It’s horrific and terrible, and Mother would have hated you for letting her think these things._

“No,” Gabrielle is saying, quiet as a breath. “No, she wasn’t.”

*

After the meal, they separate again.

Cyane takes Gabrielle aside to discuss her tattoos. Eve isn’t invited, of course, but she listens from a distance because they can’t bind her ears, because they can’t take that away, horrified to read their lips and see them shaping words like _‘fire’_ and _‘magic’_. She’s not unfamiliar with either of those things — after all, Livia shared more than words with the god of war, and learned more than military tactics from him too — but it makes her feel unpleasant to see Gabrielle talking about them as though they’re nothing at all, as though the idea of a ritual incantation and a brand searing her skin isn’t something to approach with even a little bit of caution.

Gabrielle is still pale, but she’s flushed now with determination, in much the same way she was when they reunited, when she was pulling Mother’s chakram out of a dead soldier, when her eyes were blank and her shoulders were tight, when she let herself believe she’d found a purpose in protecting the innocent by slaughtering the unworthy. Eve shudders at the memory of that, at the idea that _this_ is the kind of closure Gabrielle is seeking among her sisters, fire and pain and the kind of archaic, masochistic foolishness that should have died with the pantheon of old gods.

Somewhat blessedly, Varia corners her before she has a chance to step in and voice her opinion on the matter.

“She took a beating for you,” she says, seemingly apropos of nothing. “She let me knock her unconscious for you.”

Eve closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to fight, but Varia is making it very difficult to silence her inner Livia. No doubt she knows that; no doubt that’s why she’s doing it. “I know that,” she says, straining to keep her voice cool. “What’s your point?”

“She _bled_ for you,” Varia goes on, as though she didn’t hear her. “Willingly, I mean. Not like the dozens of my sisters you captured against their will. She knew she’d bleed for you. She walked into that fight knowing that I’d beat her into submission, knowing that she didn’t stand a chance, knowing that she’d walk out of it with broken bones… if she walked out at all, I mean. She did all that because she wanted to save your pathetic, murdering life.”

“I know that,” Eve says again, softer now out of spite. She will not be antagonised into raising her voice or her fists. “You were quite deliberate, if I remember, in making sure my mother and I got a front-row view.”

“I was, wasn’t I?” She’s grinning, like that’s something to be proud of. “How did it feel? Watching someone you care about bleed half to death in your name, I mean. It must’ve been a real kick in the teeth, knowing that the choice was hers for once.” She hisses, venomous like a snake. “Did it make you all warm and gooey inside?”

“No,” Eve says, with honesty. “It made me feel terrible.”

Varia’s grin only widens at that. “ _Good_ ,” she says. “Remember that feeling the next time you feel like opening your damned Roman mouth and screwing this up for her.”

Eve blinks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, and means it.

“Of course you don’t.” She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t ease up. “You’re the messenger of peace now, right? You run around in your silks and your bright colours, preaching about love or forgiveness or whatever else, but you haven’t changed a bit.” Her teeth flash, but it’s not a grin any more. “It’s still your way — _Livia’s_ way — or no-one’s way.”

“That’s not—”

“Yeah, it is.” Varia is angry, but for once it doesn’t feel personal. It’s not about the two of them this time; it’s about Gabrielle and what she’s feeling, and two people who read that pain in very different ways. “Did it ever occur to you, up there on your stupid cross, that maybe she wants this?”

“I know she does,” Eve says evenly. “That doesn’t mean she should.”

“Oh yeah?” Varia snaps, heated. “And why not? Because _you_ don’t?”

“Because…”

But what can she say to that? It’s true enough, isn’t it? Eve doesn’t want this, and she’s made no secret of the fact. She doesn’t want to see Gabrielle in pain, and she doesn’t understand why she’d want to go through something so terrible just to rid herself of a few ink stains under the skin. She’s heard Gabrielle talking to her imaginary visions, to the phantasm she imagines is Mother, and she doesn’t understand now any more than she did before why it’s so important to her.

_You can’t purge yourself of this,_ she thinks. _You can’t pretend it didn’t happen by washing away the evidence. Mother is dead, and we both have to live with that. You can’t bring her back by erasing something else_.

“Grief is a private thing, Livia.” The use of that name is deliberate, Eve can tell, and she doesn’t correct her. “You have no right telling Gabrielle what she should or shouldn’t do, how she should or shouldn’t deal with her private pain. You have no right to interrupt any one of us when we’re talking about a departed friend. Every woman left alive in the Amazon Nation owes Xena and Gabrielle a debt you can’t even imagine, and none more so than me.”

Eve doesn’t know what to make of that. She doesn’t know whether Varia is alluding to some moment in her own history history, some echo of the years when Livia was a Roman menace, or whether it’s something more recent, something that happened after Eve went East with her message.

“She was my mother,” she says, realising she doesn’t care either way. She sounds petulant, and she can’t deny that she deserves the disgusted look Varia shoots her. “Gabrielle is… _was_ her lover. That makes her my family too.”

“Not denying that,” Varia says.

Eve ignores her. “I’ve seen her grieve like this before. I’ve seen what her ‘private pain’ does to her, and I’ve seen the consequences when it’s left unchecked. She’s not thinking clearly, and you’re just encouraging her to… to…”

“To follow her heart,” Varia counters, angry. “To do what’s right for _her_. Not for _us_. And certainly not for _you_.”

“She wants to mutilate her body just to get rid of some tattoos!”

Varia fixes her with a sober, steady look. She’s still angry, Eve can tell, but she’s controlling it more effectively than she did the last time their paths crossed. She’s matured now, a woman wholly changed from the Ares-corrupted, vengeance-driven young queen that rallied her sisters into baying for blood.

“So what if she does?” she demands. “How is it your business?”

It isn’t, really, but still Eve feels that she can’t let it go. She owes it to Mother, almost more than she owes it to Gabrielle herself, to protect her from the thing she wants to become, to keep her safe from the parts of herself that are so easily twisted. She recalls so clearly a moment in the rain outside a nameless tavern, Gabrielle bleeding to death with her head gashed open, Eve bleeding and struggling as well, and Mother whispering words of love to the both of them. _“You’re the most pure thing in my life,”_ she said to Gabrielle, and Eve has always remembered that.

“It’s not,” she says to Varia. “It’s not my business at all. But it was my mother’s, and I’m all that’s left of her.”

Varia looks her up and down, not bothering to hide the disdain. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she says.

Eve meets her eye. She has a thousand reasons to flinch, each more compelling than the last, but she doesn’t heed any of them. “I’m not,” she says. “It’s the truth. I know it’s not what you want to hear. It’s not what I want to hear either. But it’s true. Gabrielle and I are all she had. If she loses sight of that…”

“It’s _her_ sight to lose,” Varia says again, sharper now. “You follow your path. Let Gabrielle choose hers. It’s not for you to decide what’s good or bad for her. It’s not for you to try and protect her from something that might help her to heal. You think your mother would’ve wanted that?”

She sneers as she says the word _‘mother’_ , like she still refuses to accept it. Eve doesn’t try to convince her; that isn’t what this is about, and she refuses to let Varia’s petulance muddy the waters any more than she already has. 

“I do,” she says. “I know she’d want it. She’s done it before.”

Varia snorts. “Doesn’t sound like the Xena I know,” she mutters.

“You don’t know her very well,” Eve says, unbending. “Or Gabrielle. She doesn’t think straight when she’s grieving. She thinks with her heart, not her head, and if left unchecked it’ll destroy her. She feels too strongly, and she always tries to do things she shouldn’t.” She closes her eyes for a moment, remembering Mogador, Gurkhan, Gabrielle and her broken family. “Mother risked her life, risked Gabrielle’s _love_ to keep her from doing something just like this. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t try to do the same.”

“She might never forgive you if you do,” Varia returns. “Is that really a compromise you want to make? You’d screw over someone still alive to do right by your dead mother?”

Eve doesn’t tell her how long she’s spent treading a dead man’s path. She doesn’t tell her how much comfort the dead can bring to the living. She definitely doesn’t tell her that Gabrielle has been speaking to a vision of Mother’s dead spirit for at least as long as they’ve been travelling together. Someone like Varia could never understand that kind of complexity, that kind of _faith_. She feels only as much as she can see with her eyes, and Eve will not waste her breath trying to enlighten her.

“Gabrielle wants to do right by her as well,” she says. “She’s just in too much pain to remember that just now.”

Varia rolls her eyes. “Gods, could you _be_ more holier-than-thou?”

She means it as an insult, but it makes Eve smile. Varia might not realise it, but accusing her of being obsessed with doing good is a big step up from _‘Livia’_ and _‘Bitch of Rome’_ and all the other accurate insults she’s been throwing around. They’ll probably never get along, but it means a great deal to Eve that at least in this moment Varia is looking at her and seeing the woman she _is_ , rather than the one she _was_.

“Gabrielle is my family,” she says, quite simply.

“She’s our family too,” Varia tells her, unflinching. “She’s an Amazon. That means she’s one of us. And we’ll defend her choices to the death, if it comes to that. Even from you.” Her lips quirk, a challenge masquerading as a smile. “ _Especially_ from you.”

What she means, Eve can tell, is that she’s hungry for an excuse to go toe-to-toe with her again. _Say the wrong thing, make the wrong move, do anything I don’t approve of, and I’ll take great joy in putting you in the ground._ She’s got enough insight not to call her Livia this time, but Eve can feel the name and its significance hovering between them, as potent and oppressive as the worst kind of summer heat, and it makes her sweat just as heavily.

“I don’t want any trouble,” she says. “I just don’t want her to hurt herself for something she doesn’t understand.”

“Right.” Varia raises a brow. “Because _she’s_ the one who doesn’t understand. Couldn’t possibly be the Roman bitch who doesn’t know the first thing about our people or our traditions. Couldn’t possibly be the messenger of _peace_.”

“I—”

“Shut up. I told you before, you don’t have a voice here. I’m not asking you to stay out of her way. You’ll do that anyway, one way or another. I’m asking you to do it of your own free will. You’re gonna keep your mouth shut either way; I’m just giving you a chance to save some little shred of her friendship before it’s too late. Whatever happens, she’s going to need you. It’d be a real shame if you’ve already pushed her away by then.”

Eve knows that’s true. “So you’re… what?” she asks. “Warning me? Just out of the goodness of your heart?”

“No. To pay a debt to one of my sisters.” For a moment she looks reflective, even regretful. “I almost killed her.”

“I think that’s a little dramatic,” Eve says. “You gave her a black eye, knocked her unconscious, broke a few—”

“Not _that_.” Varia is glaring now. For the first time, this reads as something personal, like her feelings run deeper than she’d ever want someone like Eve to see. “Our people were being slaughtered, cut down one by one. I was given a chance to save them. Kill Gabrielle, and the rest of us would be saved. One little life in exchange for the entire Amazon Nation. Wouldn’t you have considered it?”

_No,_ Eve thinks, but it doesn’t bring much comfort. Today she can’t even fathom the idea of taking a life. Back when she was Livia, of course, she would have taken great joy in throwing the Amazon Nation to the slaughter.

“What happened?” she asks, because she knows that way lies madness. “You obviously didn’t succeed.”

Varia shrugs. “Not for want of trying,” she says, with unexpected honesty. “Your mother stopped me, if you must know. And, for what it’s worth, I’m glad she did. I betrayed the ideals of our people, and she knew that. We all stand for each other, every last one of us. If I’d killed Gabrielle, I might as well have slain all of my sisters myself. Xena understood that.” She swallows for a moment, overcome. “ _Gabrielle_ understood it, too. She fought with us that day like she was born with a sword in her hand, like she was made for it. She _saved_ us. Maybe if you’d seen her then, you wouldn’t be so quick to coddle her like some crying infant.”

Eve shakes her head. She doesn’t want to picture that. She doesn’t want to believe it.

“I’ll keep the Gabrielle I know,” she murmurs, very softly.

“You do that,” Varia says. “Just keep her away from the one _I_ know.”

*


	4. Chapter 4

*

They start at dawn.

Eve and Gabrielle share a hut for the night, but neither of them even try to sleep. Gabrielle paces, edgy and restless, circling the room again and again until Eve is sure she must be dizzy. She mutters to herself, and to the wall, and Eve pretends that she doesn’t hear the pain wracking her voice.

She doesn’t know what to say. In truth, after speaking with Varia, she’s not entirely convinced that she should say anything at all. This is Gabrielle’s struggle, her choice, and Eve can’t save her from its consequences. She thinks, idly, of taking a cue from Mother, of mixing up a sleeping draught and drugging Gabrielle into compliance, but she knows that it wouldn’t stop her in the end. The last time that happened, before Mogador, Gabrielle was fighting a thirst for vengeance; now she’s only fighting her own grief.

Eve can’t fight this battle for her the way Mother tried to fight Gurkhan. She can’t do anything to stave off the raw, hollow feeling she sees surging up in Gabrielle’s chest every time she speaks to the wall or to herself. That struggle is hers and hers alone. Eve might not agree with Varia over anything else, but she knows that much is true: if Gabrielle has her heart set on putting herself through this, she’ll find a way to do it one way or another. All Eve can do is be there for her, and pray that’s enough.

Perhaps an hour or two before the moon goes down, she breaks her silence. Gabrielle has stopped pacing for a while; she’s bracing against the wall, head hanging between her arms and breathing hard. Eve can’t sit there in silence another moment, knowing as she does what the sunrise will bring.

“Are you _sure_?” she asks. The words cut through the quiet of the hut like a lightning bolt from a long-dead god, like Mother at her most unstoppable. “Are you really, _truly_ sure this is what you want? The pain…”

“Cyane told me all about it,” Gabrielle says. She sounds much steadier than she looks. That’s something, Eve supposes. “I know what I’m going into.”

“I know you do,” Eve says, though she has a feeling that’s not true. It’s one thing to understand the basic details to a ritual like this; it’s another thing entirely to realise what it means to go through it. “But are you really _sure_?”

Gabrielle doesn’t move, but her shoulders do, quaking with a depth of emotion she can’t quite stifle. “No,” she whispers. “No, I’m not _sure_.”

“Then don’t do it,” Eve says. She’s almost begging. “Gabrielle, you don’t have to make this decision now. You can come back in a few months or a few years… however long you want. If you still want it, you can come back. But _now_ …” She shakes her head, sighs. “Please. Just let the ink settle for a bit. Give yourself some time to get used to it, to make peace with what it—”

“No!” She pulls her head up, whirls to face her. “Eve, I _can’t_. I can’t carry these things under my skin. I can’t walk around with them knowing how they got there, knowing what they mean and how much they cost me. I can’t do it. I _won’t_ do it. If this is the only way to get rid of them, I have to try. I have to get this feeling out of me.”

Eve doesn’t tell her that removing the tattoos won’t remove the feeling. Why hurt her more than she already is? Instead, she simply asks, “And what if it doesn’t work?”

“It will,” Gabrielle says, too fast. Eve recognises the tremors in her voice, the false certainty. She sounded exactly the same on the ship to Mogador. She hasn’t even considered the alternative, and she has no intention of doing so. “I trust Cyane. I know it’ll work.”

Eve doesn’t know whether to hope she’s right or pray she’s wrong.

*

Right or wrong, neither really lessens the pain.

Eve isn’t allowed into Cyane’s hut during the ritual. Varia says that it’s a sacred thing, for Amazon eyes only, though she doesn’t seem to know much more about it than Eve does. That’s fair enough; Eve supposes; she might not be familiar with the way things work here, the differences between the tribes and the ways they came together to form the Amazon Nation, but she understands how many different traditions and customs they must have brought together. No-one, not even a self-professed queen, can possibly know them all.

True to her word, Eve does as she’s told and stays out of the way. She offers Gabrielle a brief, worried look, and feels her heart sink at the hard lines deepening on on her face. She doesn’t say anything but Eve can read her expression, and it says _‘I wouldn’t want you there with me anyway’_.

The rejection is a harsh blow, and Eve wonders if Varia knew about it, if she and Gabrielle have spoken somehow, if Gabrielle told her to keep Eve away from her in the kindest way possible. She wonders, as well, if she did it for her own sake, or to try and protect Eve from whatever pain this ritual involves.

Either way, the end result is the same: she stands outside and waits with one ear to the door and one eye on Varia.

Gabrielle doesn’t scream. Eve wonders, morbidly, what a scream would sound like from her. For all the pain she’s seen her go through, she’s never heard her lose control like that. She howled to the heavens that night in Poteidaia when her rage and her grief overpowered her, but Eve knows entirely too well that roaring for vengeance is wholly different from screaming in pain.

She’s never seen her cry, either, she realises. She knows that she must have — she’s seen the salt-tracks left behind — but she’s never seen it for herself. She wonders if it’s pride that keeps those things inside, or something deeper.

Varia, seeming to sense the conflict inside her, puts a hand on her arm. “Xena always underestimated her too,” she says, an accusation veiled in conversation.

Even at the best of times, Eve bristles to hear anyone speaking ill of her mother, but here and now, with Xena dead and Gabrielle grieving, hearing it from Varia of all people cuts far more deeply than it ever has before. She wants to lash out, wants to embrace the tiny place left inside of her that never quite let go of Livia, the part that thrives on hurting people. She wants to leave bruises on Varia’s face, blacker and bluer than anything she ever did to Gabrielle. She wants to—

A low groan cuts through her thoughts, echoing from behind the door. It rends her, brings her back to the present, and cuts off the tide of violence before it can start. _Gabrielle_ , she thinks, and aches all over.

“You don’t know the first thing about my mother,” she says to Varia. “Or her relationship with Gabrielle.”

“I probably know as much as you do,” Varia shoots back, perfectly calm. “I bet _you_ never got to fight back-to-back with them.”

“I don’t fight any more,” Eve reminds them both. The confession comes easy; the deeper meaning rather less so. “So no, I didn’t. But I travelled with them. I lived and learned with them. I bled with them.”

“You bled _next to_ them,” Varia says. “That’s not the same thing.”

It’s not. Eve knows that, and she hates it. She hates that Varia has a claim something she never will, that Mother and Gabrielle share a bond with these near-strangers that they don’t share with their own blood. Gabrielle calls the Amazons her sisters, and the light that shines from her eyes when she says it is pure in the same way that Mother always said she was. The truest kind of purity, the kind that comes from true, untainted love.

There’s none of that purity in her when she looks at Eve, despite her best intentions. There was none of it in Mother, either, though admitting that is far harder. They both look at her through strangers’ eyes, as though even now they’re still trying to figure out exactly who she is, and when they call her ‘family’ or ‘daughter’ it’s always with the voice of someone holding their true feelings back.

 _“She’s my daughter too,”_ Gabrielle told her phantasms, and Eve wonders if she still thinks that now they’re here among the women she calls her sisters.

“Do you even know the first thing about this ritual?” she asks Varia. “Do you have any idea what she’s putting herself through?”

“I don’t need to know,” Varia says. It’s to her credit that she doesn’t evade or lie. “It’s Cyane’s ritual, not mine. Her tribe, her traditions, her rules.”

Eve shakes her head, annoyed and disgusted. “She could be torturing her in there,” she says. “For all you know, she’s—”

“She’s my sister,” Varia snaps, as though that word marks the end of any argument. “And so is Gabrielle. She asked for this, _Eve_. She wanted it. Do you really need me to remind you of that?”

Eve doesn’t get a chance to answer. Gabrielle’s voice cuts her off, a throat-razing wail carving through the air.

It’s still not a scream, but it’s very close. It makes Eve think again of that vengeance-seeking howl she let out in Poteidaia. She remembers the weather, more than anything else, the heavens opening up out of nowhere, the lightning and the thunder and the impossible, world-drowning rain. She remembers Gabrielle’s voice was so raw, worn to almost nothing under the weight of her grief, her loss, her pain. She remembers the way that word, _‘vengeance’_ , echoed on the air, how strange it sounded on Gabrielle’s tongue. There is no vengeance in her now, but the pain is just as raw.

Without even realising what she’s doing, she’s throwing Varia aside, throwing open that damned door, and throwing herself into the hut beyond. Amazon regulations be damned, she thinks. Her family needs her.

For the first time in their shared history, Varia doesn’t stop her.

*

She’s not sure what she expects to find, but what she does is worse.

Gabrielle is lying on her front, naked but for a thin sheet, and Cyane is standing over her, balming the dragon on her back with a strong, sweet-smelling salve. For a split-second, Eve wonders if they’re still preparing, if all that noise was just the prelude to the main event… but then she sees the the truth of it, the burns on the skin, angry red lesions marring the surface where the ink still stains, and she knows that the truth is more painful by far.

Gabrielle was utterly convinced it would work. Eve didn’t know if she wanted her to be right, but seeing now that she was wrong is like a blow to her most sensitive places.

She’s not crying — she’s _still_ not crying — but Eve can see another howl trembling in her throat. She realises now, seeing her like this, that it was never the pain that made her wail, but the horror of realisation, of seeing beyond all doubt that her wide-eyed optimism wasn’t enough to get what she wanted. Eve doesn’t know Gabrielle as well as she’d like, but she knows that she has always reacted far more strongly to emotional pain than she ever does to the physical kind. It’s no surprise that she endured the latter without flinching at all, and even less of one that it was the former that finally wrung the wails from within her.

Eve doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to say _‘I’m sorry’_ because she’s not really sure she is. She’s not happy about it, but she can’t deny a part of her is grateful for this. She doesn’t want Gabrielle to wake up a month or a year or a decade down the line and wish she could still remember what those tattoos looked like. It’s far too easy to regret decisions made in the half-blind haze of grief, just as much as in the heat of adrenaline and passion. Gabrielle is not in any condition to know for sure that this is what she wants and, for all her genuine sympathies, Eve can’t deny being a little relieved to see the choice taken away from her.

Cyane looks up at her as she charges in, anguish lining her features. Her mouth twists, lower lip trembling. She looks almost as devastated as Gabrielle. No doubt Varia would say that one Amazon’s pain is pain for them all.

“I’m sorry…” she manages. “I couldn’t… I…”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Gabrielle’s voice is hoarse, but still she tries. Even now, it’s in her nature to try and ease others’ pain before tending to her own. “You did what you could.”

Eve studies the lesions on her back, sickened. They’re not as nightmarish as she anticipated, but they still look terribly painful, and she shudders again to imagine what must have inflicted them. Gabrielle sucks in her breath every time Cyane touches them, then lets it out in a shuddering groan when she’s done, her body and her heart wracked more by the futility than by the pain itself.

Eve wants to ask _‘are you happy now?’_. She wants to point to her back, lay a hand on every one of those brutal burns and ask if they were worth it, if they gave her the closure she needed. She wants to say and do a great many things, none of them kind, but she doesn’t have the heart to be so cruel. Even Livia would have struggled to find that in her right now, faced with all those choked-off groans and gasps and the tears she still refuses to shed.

“Gabrielle,” she says instead. The name echoes eerily in the cramped hut, lending weight to whatever magical forces Cyane called on for her ritual. “Are you… I mean… is it…”

Gabrielle shakes her head, and buries her face in the sheet. Her back arches for a moment, her whole body seeming to seize as she fights to hold down another yell, and then she stills.

“No,” she forces out, at last. “I guess it protects me from this too.”

Eve can’t help thinking, even now, that being protected a good thing, but she knows better than to say so out loud. Gabrielle is hurting, and it breaks Eve’s heart to know that the last thing in the world she needs right now is to be showered with optimism. Once upon a time, if Mother is to be believed, Gabrielle embodied that; no matter how dark the world got, she was always the one finding the light. Now she balls her fists in the sheet, hiding her face to hide the rage and the violence, and turns away from every flicker of hope.

“I can’t counter it.” Cyane’s voice is shaking, much harder than Gabrielle’s. She sounds exhausted, and for the first time Eve wonders what this ritual might have taken out of her. “Whoever did it… they wanted it there for good.”

Gabrielle tries to laugh, but it doesn’t sound like any kind of laughter Eve has ever heard. “She did.”

Cyane nods, though with her face hidden Gabrielle won’t see it. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Eve already suspected that would be the case. She doesn’t know much about the different kinds of magic at play here, the kind that would enable a ghost to scrawl a protective tattoo or the kind that would allow an Amazon to remove one, but she had a feeling that they wouldn’t gel naturally with each other. They’re from two completely different worlds, one from mystical Jappa and the other from Amazon history; they’re two separate lines, each cutting a path through the reality that normal people know, but they’re too far removed from each other that they won’t ever intersect.

A part of her wishes that wasn’t true. Gabrielle had poured so much of herself into this, it’s devastating to see her so devastated. She was so desperate to see those tattoos gone, so desperate to imagine that she was burning away her loss and her sorrow and her loneliness as well. Eve knows how to help people in pain, but she doesn’t have a clue how to bring Gabrielle back from a disappointment as soul-rending as this, from being told she’s stuck for the rest of her life with the one thing she wanted to be rid of. The tattoos, and the grief… she can’t remove either.

“Gabrielle…” The name sounds hollow under all of that, but it’s all Eve has to offer. “I don’t know what to—”

“You can’t.” She lifts her head, meets Eve’s eyes for the first time. Hers are bloodshot, but still so dry. Eve wonders what in the world it would take to make her cry. “You can’t say anything.”

Eve knows that she’s right. Still, she wants so badly to try.

Cyane cuts her off, though, before she can say anything more. “I don’t suppose you could save this for later?” she asks, making it an offer instead of an order. She is nothing like Varia, Eve notes. “I mean, we’ve only just finished, and she’s… well, we’re both…” She clears her throat, resting her palm on Gabrielle’s back; whether the contact is intentional or accidental, it makes Gabrielle choke on her breath. “We need some time to recover.”

There’s weight in that _‘we’_. Cyane is clearly worried about Gabrielle, but she’s also drained by her own part in this mess, upset at having to hurt one of her sisters, even one as willing as Gabrielle, and torn apart by having to revisit traditions and rituals that she must have assumed were long since buried. For a moment, Eve wants to offer a word or two of comfort to her as well.

She doesn’t, though. The best that she can do right now is to see the deeper meaning in the words, and do as the poor woman asks.

“I’ll be right outside,” she tells Gabrielle. “If you need anything…”

Gabrielle fists the sheet again. “Yeah,” she rasps.

Never in her life, whether as Livia and as herself, has Eve been more desperate to touch someone. She doesn’t, because she knows it’s the last thing Gabrielle would want, but she wants to so badly it feels like the wanting will break her. Comfort comes in countless colours, and Eve has learned to recognise the ones that complement each other. Gabrielle needs space; she needs to let out a few more screams and hopefully a few healthy sobs as well. She needs many, many things, but the one thing she definitely doesn’t need is her lover’s daughter touching her hand and pretending that she’s earned the right to do so.

Eve turns around, feeling her own fists start to clench as well. She hasn’t done that in years, not since she was Livia, since her only mother was Rome. It’s not a pleasant feeling.

“I’ll be here,” she says again, reminding them both. “Right here.”

*

Varia is waiting outside.

She must read the story in Eve’s face, because she responds as though she’s heard the words. Her features light up for about half a second, then immediately crease into a frown, and it’s not really a shock that the first words out of her mouth are “No luck?”

She doesn’t sound especially surprised about it, and that makes Eve want to punch her again.

Eve shakes her head, but doesn’t say the words out loud. Even if Varia were a friend to her, she’s not sure she trusts herself to speak right now without bursting into tears; the fact that she’s practically an enemy just makes her determined to hide that. Eve surrendered the sin of pride a long time ago, along with all the others, but the ache in her chest is deeply personal, and she doesn’t want to share it with the woman who, not so long ago, was calling for her death.

That doesn’t stop Varia drawing the words out of her anyway. “Is she taking it okay?”

Eve bites down on her lip. “What do you think?”

“I think I asked you,” Varia retorts, predictably antagonistic.

“All right.” Eve takes a deep breath, eyes closed to find her centre. Now is not the time to indulge the parts of her that still feel like Livia; now is the time to be the family Gabrielle needs. “No,” she says, very slowly. “No, she’s not ‘taking it okay’. Your friend burned off half her back to remove that tattoo, but the damned thing is still there. She’ll probably be stuck with it for the rest of her life. That’s the opposite of what she wanted. It’s everything she _didn’t_ want. It’s…”

She trails off, choked by emotion in spite of herself. She didn’t expect it to lash as fiercely as it does, saying the words out loud. She expected to cry; she didn’t expect to feel it like a physical pain, like a fist squeezing her heart.

Varia clearly expected precisely that. There’s an odd look on her face as she listens, and it grows odder still when Eve cuts herself off. It’s as though she knew it would end this way, as though this whole sordid ordeal was as much a test of Eve’s mettle as it was for Gabrielle. Eve feels angry and used, but more than that she feels ashamed. She doesn’t know how to confront the things she sees in Varia’s eyes.

“At least you understand now,” Varia says, after a long, unpleasant silence. “At least you stand some chance of being there for her.”

“I was always going to be there for her,” Eve bites off. “I’ve been there for her from the beginning. Do you know how far we travelled for this ‘ritual’ of yours?”

“I know how far _she_ travelled,” Varia counters.

Eve doesn’t see the difference, and she doesn’t try to. “I’ve been travelling with her. We’ve been travelling together, _grieving_ together. We both lost the same person, Varia.”

“No, you didn’t.” Varia’s eyes flash, as hot with emotion as Gabrielle’s in her worst moments. “Gabrielle lost her soulmate, _Livia_. She lost the most important person in her life. She lost her whole damn world, the last little bit of her heart that she still had in one piece. You, meanwhile, lost a woman you barely knew, a stranger who happened to call herself your mother. Boo-hoo.”

“That’s not…” Eve starts, but she can’t finish.

She knows that it’s true; she doesn’t need to say it. She’s been struggling with exactly this truth almost from the moment she saw Gabrielle pull Mother’s chakram out of a man without even blinking. She knew, even then, that Gabrielle’s grief was something she could never touch, something she hadn’t earned the right to feel. She knew that, but she stayed with her anyway, desperate for something to connect to, aching to dig down inside one of them and find something that belonged to them both. A moment, a memory. _Anything_.

It didn’t exist, though. Eve’s memories of Mother are fleeting and few. Touching, always so touching, but there aren’t enough of them to shape even a full year, much less a life. Gabrielle has more than anyone else in the world, certainly more than anyone still alive. Twenty-five years in an ice cave and one ill-chosen moment from Livia laid to rest what acquaintances they once shared, the scant few who might have been able to mourn at her side. Mother and Gabrielle were the last living revenant of an age laid to rest years ago. They were all the other had.

“Fine,” she sighs after a beat. “It’s true.”

“Of course it is.” Varia rolls her eyes, but has the compassion not to rub Eve’s face in it. “She wanted to do this. Do I have to say it again? Maybe she knew that it wouldn’t work, maybe she really thought it would. Either way, she wanted it. And instead of telling her it was okay… instead of telling her you’d be there for her even if it didn’t go the way she wanted, you spent the whole damn time trying to tell her not to do it at all.”

“I…” Eve closes her eyes. “I was trying to make her see sense.”

“And where did that get you?” She throws up her hands, the right one locked in a fist. “She did it anyway. Only it didn’t work, and instead of knowing that you’ll take care of her, she’s probably got your smug, self-righteous voice ringing in her ears yelling, _‘I told you so’_. How do you think that feels?”

“I…” Eve lets her mouth hang open for a brief moment, then closes it, struck by the hard truth. “You’re right.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Varia quips. “But hey, you keep doing what you think is ‘good’, in the name of Eli or Rome or whatever other idiot you’re following this week to stop you having to think for yourself. Because it’s worked out so damn well for you up till now, hasn’t it?”

“No,” Eve says, more to herself than to Varia. “No, it hasn’t.”

“Damn straight,” Varia says, utterly unforgiving. “By the gods, Messenger of Peace, if you keep trying to force her down your path, you’ll ruin her.”

Eve studies her face. For the first time since their first chance meeting, she looks her right in the eyes and searches for something deeper than the words and the insults and the pain on both sides. She looks for the young Amazon queen that Mother taught and trained, or for the confidante and equal that Gabrielle remembered when she asked to come here. She’s not looking for the woman who ordered her death, who brawled Gabrielle into unconsciousness, who might have killed Mother too if not for a well-timed change of heart; she’s looking for the woman who carries the Amazon Nation on her skinny young shoulders. She looks for _Varia_ , and hates herself when she finds her.

She’s right about this, just as she’s been right about everything thus far. Gabrielle tried to walk Eli’s path — _Eve’s_ path — once before, but she turned away for Mother’s sake. When Eve learned of her death, a part of her couldn’t help wondering if Gabrielle might find some measure of solace in walking the old familiar road, in treading a path she already knew so well.

Eli’s way has brought Eve a depth of peace that she truly believed she would never know; all she wanted when she saw Gabrielle in pain was to share a little of that with her, to guide her back to a place that filled her with light and love, that gave her the hope she seems to have all but forgotten.

It’s not her path to walk, though, no more now than it ever was before. Gabrielle, unlike Eve, is past the point in her life where she can take comfort in someone else’s words. This is her path, Varia and her Amazon sisters; she led them back here because it was where she wanted to be. She has been closer to herself here than she has been since Eve found her, and for all her personal problems with the Amazons snd with Varia, Eve knows that it would be selfish to drag her away from it.

 _I won’t ruin her,_ she thinks, but not for Varia’s sake. _I swear to you, Mother, I won’t._

*

It’s a few hours before Gabrielle and Cyane leave the hut.

Gabrielle’s back is looking a little better, and she isn’t shaking any more. Cyane has bandaged the worst of the burns, and the rest seem to be bearable now, in a way they didn’t seem earlier. Eve wonders if it’s the magic of the tattoo protecting her again, or Cyane’s own talents, an Amazon’s magic to mend one of their own. Either way, it’s a relief to see that the physical pain won’t last as long as the emotional one. In a way it’s a shame — physical pain is the one thing Gabrielle can endure — but in another it’s a comfort. One less thing for them to worry about.

Or so it is for Eve. Gabrielle, she can tell, doesn’t feel that way at all.

In spite of herself, Eve reaches for her. She finds her hand, the callouses on her palm, and ignores the gritted out warnings from Varia. “How are you feeling?”

She wants so badly to hug her, and offer the sort of succour she knows Mother would have. _She’s part of me,_ she thinks. _My arms came from hers, and they can give you comfort too._ She doesn’t try, though, because she knows that it’s not what Gabrielle would want. Mother might, but she isn’t here, and Eve knows better than to force her wants onto someone who has lost so much. Varia is right about that; whatever Eve might feel in herself, whatever connection she believes she had with her mother, it pales next to Gabrielle’s. She has no right pretending it’s the same thing, or anything close.

“Gabrielle?” Varia’s voice is heavier than Eve’s, weighted by responsibility as much as compassion.

Eve doesn’t even look at her. She stares at Gabrielle’s back, the white linen bandages so much like the one still wrapped around her hand. It feels telling, more so than she wants to admit, that she wasn’t involved this time. She is supposed to be the peacemaker, the one who heals lost souls; it made her feel valued, almost worthy, that she could offer even a ghost of comfort to Gabrielle when she bled by her own, but she can’t offer the same thing here.

Gabrielle looks up, finds Eve’s face and then Varia’s. She seems to recognise that there is a more significant choice here than who she speaks to first, and for a moment she seems very small. Eve remembers again, just how young she still is, how much of her life — of all three of their lives — remains still to play out. She wishes it was more of a comfort, not just to Gabrielle, who can’t see any future at all in her sorrow, but to herself as well.

Eve has never questioned her own path. Not when she was Livia, driven to conquer in the name of her mother nation, and not after her reawakening, when the harbinger of destruction became the messenger for peace and the voice of Eli. Whichever road she’s found herself walking, whether by choice or through divine intervention, it’s always felt completely natural. She has always simply _known_ , heart-deep and soul-deep, that whatever path she’s on is right. Her whole life, she has never felt truly lost.

Gabrielle has. She felt lost before she met Mother, and now she’s without her once more she feels exactly the same way.

Eve wants to help her through that, to guide her, but the feeling is one she can’t comprehend at all. Eve came back here for Gabrielle’s sake, but Gabrielle came here out of desperation. She clung to the ink on her back, the ideal behind it, as a kind of symbol for her pain; she wanted it gone because she wanted to be free of them both. Just as she did all those years ago, when she and Mother first met, when she was trapped in her stagnant village life, here she is again in search of a way out, an escape from the things she feels trying to suffocate her. Eve can’t offer her that.

“I…” Gabrielle clears her throat. She sounds like she’s been crying, but Eve can see that she hasn’t. “I think I’m gonna stay here for a while.”

It’s not exactly a revelation. A part of her expected this, probably before Gabrielle even realised it was a possibility. Last night’s meal plays over in her head as she looks at her, as she sees the loneliness in her eyes. She remembers Varia’s hard voice, her hard words, and the way Gabrielle defended them without a thought. She remembers the hardness in Gabrielle’s voice, too, when she said _“it’s one of the reasons why I came”_. She needs to mourn in her own way, and through her conversations with Varia, Eve is slowly coming to realise that might mean the Amazon way.

“I see,” she says, because she doesn’t want to say _‘I knew it’_.

Gabrielle blinks a few times, then takes a shaky breath. “The Amazons… they understand what it’s like, how it feels. They loved Xena too. And they’re my…”

“They’re your family too,” Eve says quietly. “Your sisters.”

Varia blinks, visibly stunned to hear those words from her. “You get it,” she murmurs, barely audible, then turns to Gabrielle. “You’re always welcome here. You know how much the Amazon Nation owes you.”

Gabrielle doesn’t smile back. She shakes her head, blinking hard. “And you don’t know how much I owe them.”

The moment draws itself out a little too long. For a time, it’s only Cyane who seems to remember that Eve is there, that she might have a stake in this too. There’s pity in her eyes when she looks at her, as though she realised what this means before any one of them said it. Still, she tries to offer a compromise, as eager as ever to temper Varia’s passion with her quiet compassion.

“You’re welcome too,” she says. Eve doesn’t need to look at Varia to know that’s not true, though she appreciates the effort. “As long as you’re Gabrielle’s guest, you’re a guest to all of us. If you’d like…”

“No.” The word comes out stronger than she intends, and it makes Gabrielle flinch. Eve swallows, and tries to soften. “I mean, I appreciate the offer… but no. I’ve caused too much pain to your people, and I don’t…” She cuts a quick, serious look at Varia, but this time it’s not their history she’s sharing. “I don’t belong here.”

Varia studies her, long and hard.

“You don’t,” she says. “But keep this up, maybe one day you will.”

*

Gabrielle takes her aside for a private farewell.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t… I thought…”

“I know,” Eve tells her. “These women understand what you’re going through. I don’t. Maybe I shouldn’t. And this…” She gestures, not sure whether she’s referencing the Amazon village or the too-brief journey they took together to get here. “If we’re both honest, I don’t think I was ever going to be what you needed. I’m too…”

She wants to say _‘too set on my own path’_ , but Gabrielle finishes for her before she can force the words out. “You’re too close to _her_.”

Eve definitely doesn’t think that’s true. She’s spent the last day or so listening to Varia reel off all the countless ways she will never be like her mother, all the ways that she’s a traitor claiming her name. It’s about Gabrielle’s grief, Varia said again and again and again, and Eve knows that it’s the truth. She might carry Mother’s blood in her veins, might bear her name and her legacy, but she is as far from her right now as she is from her other mother, the Roman Empire.

“I don’t think that’s true,” she says.

“It is,” Gabrielle murmurs, sorrowful. It doesn’t sound like a good thing. “She was always trying to protect me, always trying to keep me from where I needed to be.” She turns away, addressing the air now for the first time since they arrived here. “Do you remember? You would’ve done anything to keep me safe. Even from myself.”

Eve does remember, of course, but she’s not the one Gabrielle’s talking to.

“Well, I don’t want to be kept safe,” Gabrielle goes on, hoarse and ragged. “I don’t want to be protected. Xena, everything hurts. If you’re not here, I don’t want to be kept safe from that. That pain, that fist in my gut, that knife in my heart… it’s all I have left, and you can’t protect me from that. You can’t…” She whirls around, not to face Eve but to claw futilely at the bandages on her back. She can’t really reach, but that doesn’t stop her trying. “You can’t protect me any more, Xena. Your stupid tattoos can’t protect me.”

“Gabrielle.” Eve takes her hand, thumbs the place on her palm where she cut herself on the chakram. “Gabrielle, it’s…”

“I wanted them gone,” Gabrielle says, and it takes Eve a long moment to realise that she actually is speaking to her this time. “I thought I could… I thought if I got rid of them, everything would be simpler. I thought I’d be able to move on. But it didn’t work. And now I have to… I…”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Eve tells her gently.

Gabrielle looks up at her. She knows, Eve can tell; her eyes are bright, trembling for the first time with something that looks like tears. _Cry,_ Eve thinks. _Please, just once, let me see you cry for her._

She doesn’t, though. “I don’t know what to do,” she says instead, and pulls away. “She put herself under my skin, Eve. It doesn’t matter where I go or what I do, she’ll always be there trying to protect me. Even now… even after she’s gone, she still won’t let me make my own choices. She won’t let me choose my own mistakes. She won’t…”

Eve turns away, discomfited. That hits closer to home than she’d care to admit. “I guess I am like her, after all,” she says, with no small measure of regret.

“You are.” Gabrielle sounds regretful too, but so tender. “And you’re like me too.”

That touches her. Eve knows that there’s no real piece of Gabrielle inside her, that she played no part at all in her conception. She’s not truly her mother, not like Xena is; the only bond they share is in their hearts. In a way, she supposes, that makes it stronger. In another, with twenty-five years and so much life between them, it’ll never be enough.

“I hope you find some peace here,” she says. “For a time, at least.”

“I hope so too.” Gabrielle sighs. “I don’t know what I need, or what I want. I just know that being among the Amazons… it’s the only place that ever felt like home. Other than…”

Eve can’t help herself any more; uncaring of the consequences, she pulls her into a hug. Her arms are nothing like Mother’s, she knows, but she hugs Gabrielle with the same ferocity she always saw in her, the same passion and the need to protect her, to shelter her and keep her safe from her own darkest feelings. She feels so much of Mother in the contact, and so much more in the moment that Gabrielle hugs back.

“…other than _here_ ,” Gabrielle finishes, shuddering against her.

Gentle, ever so gentle, Eve pulls back to cup her face, looking deep into her eyes. The tears are so close to the surface now, so devastatingly close. She can’t fight them back, and at long last she doesn’t try. Eve leans in just a little, just enough to kiss the top of her head, to hold her lips there for a moment or two, the way Mother used to do, and that’s all it takes. Breath rattling in her chest, shoulders heaving as she finally, _finally_ lets herself cry, Gabrielle turns to stare into the empty space, to search for her phantoms as she has so many times before.

“Xena,” she whispers. “Oh, _Xena_.”

And for just a moment, Eve is sure she sees her too.

*


End file.
